“Good!” muttered the lonely scientist to himself. “Everything works just as sweetly as it did that night, six years ago, when we backed out of the building-shed on the banks of the Thames, and started upon our first memorable journey!”
He reversed the great wheel controlling the valve which admitted the vapour that drove the air out of the air-chambers of the great ship, thus creating a vacuum there by the subsequent and almost instant condensation of the vapour, and, softly made his way out on deck where, walking to the rail, he looked forth upon the landscape that was dimly widening out beneath him as the Flying Fish continued to float gently upward.
It was a beautifully fine, clear, starlit night, without the faintest suspicion of a cloud anywhere in the soft, velvety blue-black dome of the sky; and presently, when the professor’s eyes had grown accustomed to the dim, mysterious radiance of the twinkling constellations, he was able to see the landscape steadily unfolding around him like a map, in a rapidly widening circle, as the great ship steadily attained an ever-increasing altitude in the breathless atmosphere. For some ten minutes the scientist remained thoughtfully leaning upon the rail, watching the noble expanse of park beneath him dwindle into a mere dark, insignificant blot upon the face of the country, dotted here and there with feebly twinkling lights, until the sleeping waters of the Channel came into view to the southward. Then he returned to the pilot-house, turned on the electric light once more, and glanced at the barometer. It registered a height of nearly six thousand feet above the sea-level. This seemed to satisfy the professor; for he opened a valve which admitted air into the hull, leaving it open until the mercury ceased to fall in the tube. Then he drew from his pocket a paper which he had obtained from Mildmay a few hours before, carefully studied for a few moments the instructions written thereon, and, refolding the paper, began to manipulate certain of the levers and valves by which he was surrounded. As he did so a gentle, scarcely perceptible thrill stirred the gigantic structure which bore him—a humming sound, low at first, but rapidly increasing in intensity, arose and came floating in through the pilot-house windows—all of which the professor thereupon closed—and, seizing the tiller, the lone watcher thrust it gently over, fixing his gaze meanwhile upon the illuminated compass card of the binnacle. Presently a certain point on the compass card floated round opposite the “lubber’s mark,” whereupon the professor pulled toward him a small lever upon which he had laid his hand, and two slender steel arms forthwith slid in through a slit in the side of the compass bowl, one on each side of a slender needle that projected up through the edge of the compass card. This ingenious piece of mechanism at once caused the ship to become self-steering. Then the professor gave three or four turns to a wheel which controlled the valve admitting vapour to the engine, throwing the valve wide open, whereupon the humming sound suddenly rose to a loud and rather high, but pleasing, note as the huge propeller whirled round at its full speed of one thousand revolutions per minute. At the same moment the professor noted the exact time by a clock that formed a portion of the complicated furniture of the pilot-house, and then, seating himself in a comfortable deck chair, he proceeded to make certain calculations upon a leaf of a notebook which he drew from his pocket. At the expiration of a period of twenty minutes the professor threw the self-steering apparatus out of gear for a moment, altered the course a trifle to the eastward, threw the self-steering apparatus into gear again, and waited another twenty minutes, when the same process was repeated a second time, and so on, a slight alteration of the ship’s course being effected at intervals of twenty minutes. The professor was causing the ship to make the long, circular sweep of which he had spoken to Sir Reginald a few hours earlier.
At length, as the lonely scientist sat there in the pilot-house, plunged in deep thought, and mechanically performing the simple operations necessary to enable him to alter the course of the ship from time to time, the mirror-like discs of the scuttles in the walls of the pilot-house gradually underwent a subtle change of colour—from deepest black, through an infinite variety of shades of grey, to a pure, rich blue which, in its turn, merged into a delicate primrose hue, while the incandescent lamp in the dome-like roof of the structure as gradually lost its radiance until it became a mere white-hot thread in the growing flood of cold morning light. Meanwhile the moment arrived for a further alteration in the course of the ship; and as the professor rose to his feet to effect it he realised that not only had the day broken, but also the sun was about to rise, for long, spoke-like shafts of clear white light were radiating upward into the blue from a point broad on the starboard bow.
As he realised this, he reached forward, turned a button, and the glowing film of the electric lamp overhead dulled into blackness and disappeared.
Then, stepping to one of the scuttles, the professor looked out through the thick disc of plate-glass, and beheld a sight of beauty that is given only to the adventurous few to look upon—a sea of dense, opaque, fleecy cloud, white as the driven snow in the high lights, with its irregular surface, some sixteen hundred feet below, broken up into a thousand tender, delicate, pearly shadows that came and went, and momentarily changed their tints as the Flying Fish swept over them at a speed of one hundred and twenty miles an hour.
“Ha, ha!” exclaimed the professor, as he gazed forth upon the wondrous sight. “Good! I expected as much. Now we are safe from observation so long as this cloud-bank intervenes between us and the earth; when it passes away we must—But what am I thinking about? The sun is about to rise. I must call her ladyship, and my little friend Feodorovna—it will be far too splendid a sight for them to lose!”
So saying the worthy man turned and hurried down the staircase toward what may be termed the main, or principal, deck of the ship. As he descended he became aware of the sound of gay voices, male and female; and when he reached the vestibule he found one of the doors of the dining-saloon wide open. It was from this apartment that the voices proceeded, and, entering, he found the entire party—with the exception of little Ida and her nurse—seated at the table, warmly attired, and partaking of coffee.
“Hillo, Professor, good morning!” shouted Sir Reginald, as his eyes fell upon the newcomer. “You are just in the nick of time. George, a cup of coffee for Herr von Schalckenberg! So you have made a start, Professor; but you must have done it very gently, for none of us was awakened by the movement of the ship. Where are we now?”
“If it is as calm now as it was when we started, we ought to be over the mouth of the Humber, and just leaving the shores of England behind us,” answered the professor. “But I cannot tell for certain,” he continued, “because, as you may have noticed, there is a dense sea of cloud below us, through which we can see nothing. My object in leaving the pilot-house was to call Lady Elphinstone and my young friend, Feodorovna, to come up and see the sun rise over the clouds. But you must come up at once, or you will be too late.”