“Maybe we’ll smash into the red balloon,” suggested Bob. “It must be below and ahead of us.”
“It’s very hard to say where it is,” remarked Jerry, “but I don’t believe there’s any danger of a collision. We’re only a thousand feet high now,” he added, looking at one of the registers in the cabin.
“Yes, and we’re right over some city,” added Ned, opening a cabin window and thrusting his head out to take an observation. “I can see thousands of lights underneath us.”
The other boys also looked, and saw below them what seemed to be millions of tiny fireflies, as they sparkle over a meadow on a June night. They were the lights of a large city, and doubtless the inhabitants of it, if they looked up and saw an illuminated body shooting across the heavens (for the lights of the motor ship could plainly be seen from below), imagined that it was a new style of comet, as, indeed, it was.
Then as Mr. Glassford again shifted the lever of the elevation rudder, the motor ship resumed an even keel and shot along about nine hundred feet above the earth. It was calmer at this elevation, and though the signs of the storm did not abate the travelers hoped they might escape the worst of it.
But the hope was a vain one. Half an hour later, when the boys were beginning to think of seeking their bunks, for they were very tired from the day of preparation, the ship suddenly lurched to one side. It was such a violent motion that Bob, who was walking across the cabin, was thrown into Jerry’s lap, as he sat reading a paper.
“What’s the matter?” cried Professor Snodgrass, looking up from some notes he was making concerning the latest insects he had captured. “Have we landed?”
“We’re in a bad storm,” called Mr. Glassford from the steering tower. “Jerry, you’ll have to come here and help me. I can’t manage everything at once.”
Once more the ship tilted at an unpleasant angle, but Jerry managed to make his way to the pilot house.
“Change the planes!” cried Mr. Glassford, and he had to shout to make his voice heard above the noise of a counter current of wind that was now howling through the rigging of wires and wooden braces. “Shift them about four feet. That may put us on a level keel again,” for the motor ship was now almost in the position of a sailing ship when she has nearly been thrown “on her beam-ends” by a heavy blow and the action of the waves.