He felt momentarily as if his ear-drums must burst with the incessant and tremendous concussions registered upon them; but presently this sensation passed, leaving him with that of permanent deafness.
Before he could recover and regain control of his startled wits the aviator had thrown down a lever, and the great fabric was in motion.
It swept down the field like a frightened swan; and the wheels of its chassis, registering every infinitesimal irregularity in the surface of the ground, magnified them all a hundred-fold. It was like riding in a tumbril driven at top-speed over the Giant's Causeway. Lanyard was shaken violently to the very marrow of his bones; he believed that even his eyes must be rattling in their sockets….
Then the Parrott began to ascend. Singularly enough, this change was marked, at first, by no more than slight lessening of the vibration: still the machine seemed to be dashing over a cobbled thoroughfare at breakneck speed; and Lanyard found it difficult to appreciate that they were afloat, even when he looked down and discovered a hundred feet of space between himself and the practice-field.
In another breath they were soaring over housetops.
Momentarily, now, the shocks became less frequent. And presently they ceased almost altogether, to be repeated only at rare intervals, when the drift of air opposing the planes developed irregularities in its velocity. There succeeded, in contrast, the sublimest peace; even the roaring of the propeller dwindled to a sustained drone; the biplane seemed to float without an effort upon a vast, still sea, flawed only occasionally by inconsiderable ripples.
Still rising, they surprised the earliest rays of the sun; and in their virgin light the aeroplane was transformed into a thing of gossamer gold.
Continually the air buffeted their faces like a flood of icy water.
Below, the scroll of the world unrolled like some vast and intricately illuminated missal, or like some strange mosaic, marvellously minute….
Lanyard could see the dial of the compass, fixed to a strut on the
pilot's left. By that telltale their course lay nearly due northeast.
Already the weltering roofs of Paris were in sight, to the right, the
Eiffel Tower spearing up like a fairy pillar of gold lace-work, the
Seine looping the cluttered acres like a sleek brown serpent, the
Sacré-Coeur a dream-palace of opalescent walls.