CHAPTER XVIII THE GOLDEN DREAM
The strangely-shaped propellers bit the air at once, the walls of the cavern, flooded with spectral light, slid backwards, and as the ship swerved round the curve towards the entrance, the day leapt at us.
Wow! but it was touch and go during the next ten seconds. If it had not been for Gascoigne I am sure that I should never have gone through. The great ship shot out of its lair like a dart; a touch upon the little steering-wheel and she was banking in the terrible right-hand turn; the granite walls seemed rushing to meet and crush her, and only the quick, steady words of command from the prisoner, which like an automaton I obeyed, got her finally into the straight....
And then—oh, then—I opened out the marvellous engines; she seemed to shake herself for an instant like a bird poised for a long flight, and, humming like a wasp, she shot up and out to sea....
The needle upon the speed indicator quivered round its dial, moving ever upwards. Eighty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty—and thirty more—we were doing nearly two hundred miles an hour, straight out over the Atlantic before I had a thought of our destination, or of anything but the supreme glory of that rush up the dawn wind.
The whole morning world was blue and gold, new-built and beautiful. Far below, the Mother of Oceans lay in an unwrinkled sheet of sapphire, "as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire." A tiny purple cloud upon the horizon was the Isles of Scilly, sleeping under the sun.
Connie stole in and stood by my side, her hand upon my shoulder, and I knew that her heart also was full to overflowing, as memory flared up and down in us like the flame of a lamp in a draught. It was a moment so exquisite, so full of gratitude to God, that no words of mine can do more than hint at it. For we had escaped from hell and the snare of devils, and knew it in one lightning flash of gratitude and joy.