When Henri had a look at the powerful motors he was impressed with their capacity to drink up petrol at a most appalling rate.
"What's her top speed?" he asked one of the big fellows who had traveled over from Berlin with them.
"Forty-five miles in the calm," was the reply.
"Gee!" exclaimed Billy. "We could get a seaplane home for breakfast while they were waiting supper on you!"
"Yet," claimed the Zeppelin expert, "it's the car they're all afraid of."
"It certainly does look like a scaremark," admitted Henri, who remembered a certain evening on the Belgian coast, when he was one of the company aboard a stranded hydroplane dragged ashore by the swinging anchor of a Zeppelin, which loomed overhead like a cloud, and buzzed like a million bees.
A gang of at least a hundred men swarmed about the shed when the order issued for a trial trip of the new super-Zeppelin, a sample of the fleet in course of building, and Roque carefully noted every detail of equipment.
The gas chambers were fed with pure hydrogen, no common coal gas, and many thousand cubic meters were in the flow of this one envelope filling.
"Guess they'd have to carry a hydrogen factory around with this outfit to keep it going," observed Billy, as he noted the elaborate process.
"Not that bad," advised the man at his elbow, "this gas can be transported from the factory in cylinders under pressure."