"Himmel!" he shrieked, as the vessel headed downward and shot toward the sand. "Hold her! She is falling! We shall all be killed."
He formed the mad resolution of rushing to the engine-room, and stepped in that direction. But, as we have said, the inclination of the decks considerably upset his equilibrium. The magnate indeed took a header, slithered along the smooth platform beneath the gas chambers, and landed up against one of the partitions with a bang which shook his eyeglass from its holding. By then the vessel was within a hundred feet of the canal, sailing along directly over it, and just ahead of the ship ploughing her way through the water.
What cheers there were! How the passengers on that eastward-bound vessel crowded the decks and shouted! And then the liner hoisted her Union Jack, and dipped it formally. At once the watchful Hawkins responded from the deck above, while again cheers came to the ears of Dick and his friends.
"And just contrast the two ships," said Alec, when they had progressed in this fashion for perhaps an hour. "Look! You can see the airship's reflection in the water, and, my! ain't she a whopper!"
Yes, she was huge, vast, incredibly enormous. And yet how smoothly she sailed along, and with what little effort! It was a fascinating picture to behold. Dick found himself following the giant outline, picking out the various points till then invisible from the deck above, or from the platforms below. For instance, four huge attachments puzzled him immensely, for they hung from the framework and seemed without purpose.
"All the same they're meant for business," Joe told him, with that quiet, half-cynical smile for which he was notorious. "Oh yes, Dicky, we don't have useless attachments on this ship, unless—ahem! it's amongst the crew. I ain't, of course, referring to midshipmen."
But he was. He was teasing the gallant Mr. Midshipman Hamshaw, and had he been Alec there would have been a rumpus.
"Seriously, though," he went on when he had had his laugh, "they're for landing. You see, it don't do to bump a ship of this description. We want to reach terra firma gently. Now, if you were to jump from a height you'd land on your toes if possible, come down on to your heels, and then bend your knees, all by stages as it were, quickly enough you understand, but offering such graduated resistance that there would be no shock at all. That's what happens with those attachments. Each one is thirty feet in length, and hinged inside the frame of the airship at its upper and forward end. Now, watch us. We'll bump to the ground. How's that?"
It really was remarkable, and so thought the people on board the liner. For Joe's practised hand arrested the engines. The ship came to a standstill. Then she fell as if she were a dead weight, was arrested within twenty feet of the ground merely by touching a single lever, and then descended sharply. But there was no shock. Those four antennæ hinged upward beneath the weight, gradually met it, and then held her firmly suspended. Even the glassware on the saloon table was not shaken.
"And now for a trip on terra firma if only to stretch our legs," cried Joe. "We'll take it by turns, half at a time."