"Silence!" he hissed. "A noise like that may betray us."
A seemingly interminable interval followed. The Zeppelin, floating motionless in a dense and opaque bank of clouds, was endeavouring to evade her comparatively small but highly dangerous antagonist, the loud buzzing of whose engine could be distinguished with all too forcible certainty.
With every light switched off the crew of the unwieldy gas-bag waited in breathless suspense, knowing that at any moment a bomb might explode with annihilating result in the midst of the vast store of highly inflammable hydrogen above their heads.
For how long this state of almost unbearable suspense and nerve-racking tension lasted von Eitelwurmer had not the slightest idea. In Cimmerian darkness he sat, shivering with cold and fear, his eyes fixed upon the motionless form of one of the machine-gunners who, leaning out of one of the open apertures, was striving to locate the presence of the unseen but audible British seaplane.
Every time that the drone of the biplane's engine rose to a crescendo the spy's finger-nails cut into the palms of his benumbed hands. Vaguely he wondered what the end would be: whether the intense cold would give place to violent heat as the Zeppelin, a mass of flames, crashed headlong, or whether in the absence of an explosion the agony would be prolonged until the gondola, pinned down by the weight of the shattered framework of the gas-bag, would plunge beneath the waves and cause him to drown like a rat in a trap. He gave no thought to his companions. It was he that mattered. He was in peril. The rest—well, that was their affair. They had undertaken the raid and its attendant risk to themselves. It seemed hard that he—an involuntary passenger—should be faced with the immediate prospect of being burnt to a cinder in mid-air or stifled in the icy waters of the North Sea.
The whirr of the seaplane's propeller increased in volume, more than at any previous time during the Zeppelin's sojourn in the clouds.
Suddenly the machine-gunner uttered an exclamation and nudged his companion. A succession of blinding flashes and the rapid rattle of the automatic weapon dazzled the eyes and dulled the hearing of the demoralised spy. Yet, impelled by an unseen force, von Eitelwurmer raised himself and peered out of the scuttle.
The sight that met his eye was enough to appal a man of high moral and physical fibre, let alone the nerve-stricken spy; for, apparently heading straight for the Zeppelin and with her planes distinctly visible in the flashes of the machine-gun, was the avenging British seaplane. With a wild, unearthly shriek von Eitelwurmer threw up his arms and fell unconscious upon the floor of the gondola.