"Berla." Croft loosened his hand to lay it on Robur's shoulder, look into the son of Jadgor's eager face. "It is not in my heart, Rob, to refuse you anything in this."
Dawn came and Himyra gasped—gasped and stood with heads back-tilted, staring upward at a mighty oblong bag that swung in majestic fashion high above the walls. It hung there like a monstrous bubble, glinting as the rays of Sirius struck upon it—drifting slowly as it seemed before the winds of morning. And yet—even as they watched it, turning and moving against the wind in steady fashion—silently—without seeming reason, too high above the red, red city of Aphur, for the ears of her people to sense how its moturs roared.
An hour before—under direction of Croft and Robur—it had been dragged slowly forth from its concealing shed. With filled tanks its engines waited the awakening touch of the engineers—men selected for this first attempt at dirigible navigation from the aviation personnel by Croft himself. A huge flash of the liquid fire, equipped with its spraying device, was attached to the carrier designed to hold it. When this was done Croft and Robur stepped aboard.
A hundred workmen—men who had labored to construct it—held the ropes that still controlled it, ready to release it at a word.
"Let go!" That word came in the Mouthpiece of Zitu's voice.
Two hundred hands relaxed their hold upon the ropes. The blimp soared toward the skies.
Himyra fell away beneath it, became a red gem on the yellow sand of the desert, the breast of Aphur, pierced by the thread of the Na like a sparkling, supporting chain. To the north and east the waters of the Central Sea showed as bright as burnished silver under the first rays of the sun.
Robur made no comment, said no word. He stood tight-lipped, gripping the rail of the platform on which they rode with tensely muscled hands. Croft ordered the engines started—and even so there was no feeling that the mighty fabric moved. Rather it seemed stationary, the only solid thing in all existence, while Palos and all it held dropped away from beneath it, until Himyra's palaces and shops and houses became things no larger than the toys of children, her people, pigmies moving antlike on her streets.
Croft pointed beyond the walls.
"The desert," he said and watched while the blimp answered to the manipulation of her engines—her rudder and vanes.