The manometer now registered a thousand feet. No longer the clouds afforded protection. The country had the aspect of being fiat, and almost destitute of trees; nor were there any signs of human habitation. On the distant eastern horizon could be discerned the smoking chimneys of a manufacturing town. To prolong the flight much further would be literally throwing away the chances that the airmen already held.
"We'll descend here," announced Blake, turning the battleplane head to wind. "Stand by to jump for it if the wind threatens to capsize her on landing."
The warning was necessary, for, owing to the jamming of the wing mechanism, the wings could not be folded immediately upon contact with the ground. The now rigid expanse of planes would have to withstand the full force of the gale, and everything depended upon the angle of inclination—whether it was sufficiently small to enable the weight of the machine to pin it to the ground.
Down planed the mechanical bird at a tremendous rate. Although it cleft the air at nearly seventy miles an hour its progress over the ground and against the wind was practically nil. In point of fact the battleplane was dropping vertically earthwards at a rate of fifteen feet per second.
Quickly the almost uniform motion gave place to a series of erratic jerks. The falling machine was in the influence of the rebound of the wind from the irregular surface of the ground. The motion reminded the lads of a small boat encountering the "wash" of a huge steamer.
With a double bump the battleplane struck the ground, reared until her landing-wheels were three feet in the air, and bumped again. Then rocking violently she showed every inclination to capsize, until Athol and the sergeant, sliding to terra firma at the risk of life and limb, clung tenaciously to the partly-tilted wings.
"Good men!" shouted Blake encouragingly, as he depressed the aerilons to counteract as much as possible the lifting tendency of the wind upon the wings. "A spanner there, Dick: shift those two nuts as sharp as you can."
Dick swarmed over the side, and clinging with one arm and both feet to one of the vibrating trellis girders, set desperately to work on the nuts and bolts securing the bent rod to the underside of the left wing. With the removal of the metal bar the wings were folded, and for the time being all danger of the battleplane being overturned by the gale was at an end.
"No signs of our friends the enemy," said Blake, standing erect upon the deck of the fuselage and sweeping the treeless plain with his binoculars. "There's a small village about three miles away. I can see the church spire and the roofs of the houses; the place lies in a hollow. Beyond that there are no signs of human habitation."
"Don't you think, sir," asked Sergeant O'Rafferty, "that if we pushed the machine a couple of hundred yards in that direction there would be more shelter in that dip in the ground? It's not deep enough to hide the battleplane entirely, but it may help things a bit."