Then I become suddenly conscious of a glare upon the machine. I look down to the left, and at once I see a great dazzling eye of light, so brilliant and strong that it shimmers and wheels and boils as I gaze into it. We have been caught by a searchlight, and held. In a swift moment I see the long arms in the sky about us move with a common impulse towards the machine, until wherever I look I see eyes, eyes, eyes in a vast circle around us.
"Oh, Jimmy! They've got us! They've got us!" I cry out. "Shove on the engines, and push her down to ninety! Keep straight on—quick! quick! Push her down to ninety!"
No need is there now to be silent. We are by chance discovered, and are in the pitiless grip of fourteen powerful arms of radiance. Wherever I look there is light, light. I cannot see the ground below; I cannot see the stars above. We swim in a sea of brilliance. I am as blinded as when at times I have met upon a dark country road at night some car with huge head-lights, whose white glare has dazzled me and pinned me to the side of the road in fear. Each of these searchlights upturned against me now are many times more brilliant than the acetylene lamps of a car, and there are fourteen of them.
I am tense and quick-breathed. I feel stripped, naked, and ashamed. I am most tremendously conscious of my visibility to those below, and know that one and all they hate me. I put my hand across my eyes. I crouch lower inside the machine. Crash, crash ... crash! Ah! Now the shells, no longer scattered in an idle barrage, begin to explode near the machine, which, like a white bird, at the apex of a gigantic pyramid of light, so slowly crawls through the sky.
"Jimmy! They're shelling us! Shove the nose down—shove the nose down! Make it a hundred!"
Red flash the shells through the white haze of light in which we move. Green pour the bubbles of light in upward progress by the machine. Over the wings and over my pilot's grim-fixed face play the three colours, scarlet, emerald, and brightest white, in an unending, ever-changing ripple of colour. Now sounds the staccato and unexpectedly loud thunder of the machine-gun behind us as the gunlayer begins to direct downwards to one of the searchlights a stream of fiery tracer bullets. What use are they, I wonder? If one searchlight is destroyed there are yet thirteen to hold us in their grasp.
My heart is jumping wildly inside me. I make my hands adjust the brass taps at my side so that the fingers of the white-faced dials keep to the needful figure, but I know any second there may be a rending crash, and we may spin swiftly down and down.... Still we are held. Still the dazzle of light lies round us—still the blue-white eyes of fire stare at us with their hypnotising whirl and boil of brilliancy which makes them look so huge although so distant. Still the whole machine is clear-cut to the smallest wire in their all-exposing luminance.
I grip the pilot's arm in my fear and shout to him—
"Oh, Jimmy! Keep her going! Keep her going! Make it a hundred! We'll soon be free!"
"But we're only four thousand! We can't go any lower!" he answers.