"When do we go home?"
"We go home now!" the hand signalled, and the boy settled down in his seat to wait.
Between hunger and weariness he dozed, and soon slept soundly, his hands hanging laxly over the leather arm-rests and his head nodding over the brown satchel lying on his knees. It figured in his dreams as something huge, oppressive and uncanny, that suddenly took to itself malevolent life, spread a pair of wide leathery bat-wings, and would have flown away but that he gripped it fast.
"No, no! You shan't! I promised!" he heard himself crying, and suddenly the thing collapsed limply in his grasp and became nothing but a satchel, and he was awake. Awake and very stiff and rather sick and sleepy, and with the salt smell in his nostrils and the salt taste in his mouth that meant—that could only mean the Sea.
He looked over the gunwale and cried out in astonishment. For a vast carpet of rounded woolly-grey-white clouds lay spread beneath. The carpet beginning to rise and the cockpit floor to incline downwards, a thin clammy fog suddenly blotted out everything. The Bird had dived through a field of woolpack mixed with ground-fog. Now flying some hundred feet beneath it, she regained her level, in the clear light stained by the sunset as water in which a dash of red wine is mingled, the light that is the aftermath of a radiant summer's day. And, with the smell of the sea sharper in his nostrils, the boy became aware of moving, muddy-grey water, with ships and boats and steamers on it, far down below.
Now the southerly breeze that had steadily tagged on some twenty-three miles an hour to the Bird's eighty odd, began to veer and come in strengthening puffs and gusts from the north-west. Swirling eddies of air came upwards from the water, rocking the machine as a swell takes a boat at sea, and splashed upon the frail, silk-covered wings of the aëroplane in deluges of invisible spray.
On the right hand and the left were wide stretches of muddy grey salt water, banks of sand, and drain-piped foreshore merging in patches of potato and swede and yellow squares of unripe corn. Clusters of white dots, where shingle and sea-walls bordered the drab, restless water, were fishing hamlets, villages and little coal-port towns. Upon the north bank, rapidly receding in distance, could be dimly sensed, beyond a dense fringe of masts standing close as pins in rows upon a pincushion, the oblongs and squares and rectilinears of docks and shipyards, stone quays, and piers and tide-basins, mixed up with blocks and streets of sheds and warehouses, stations and goods-yards, and huge, many windowed factories, whose towering chimneys yet belched forth thick black smoke-gouts, licked by red tongues of flame. Though even if the Saturday noon steam-siren had not silenced the throbbing of pneumatic rivetting-hammers and the roaring of steam coal-shoots, hydraulic grain dischargers and oil-pumps, and all the hellish hubbub accompanying the huge export and import trade of Yorkshire and Lancashire with North Europe and the Continent, these sounds would not have reached the ears of the boy in the aëroplane save as a dull and muffled murmur, vaguely sensed, through the musical moaning of the stay-wires and the racket of the tractor-screw.
Now the sunset was behind. The land was rushing back upon the right and left-hand. The two-mile-wide river was broadening to a great estuary, vaster than the Thames, between Fort Victoria and Shoeburyness.
Long crawling strings of linked-up barges, sailing vessels of the old windjammer type and yachts of the latest rig, battered tramp and collier steamers, high-sided rusty looking oil-tankers, pilot-cutters, coastguard motor-launches, whole fleets of steam-trawlers, thrashed up and down its broad south side fairways or cannily negotiated the treacherous channels of the north bank. Ocean-going giants of the Merchant Service, flaunting the White Bordered Jack, or the Red Duster, or under Admiralty Warrant, displaying the Blue Ensign. Behemoths of the North Sea passenger-service showing the three-striped merchant-flag of Germany—or the tricolour of the Netherlands, or the Crosses of Norway, Sweden and Denmark—with more rarely some big grey armoured cruiser upon harbour and Coastal Defence Service, or a brace of stumpy, square-ended patrol-boats, or a trio of the stinging black hornets we have learnt to call torpedo-boat destroyers, ranging in company upon some business of the Powers that order Britannia's naval affairs.
Fascinating, wonderful to look down upon. Alike, however diverse in size, shape or uses, in the impression of flat unsubstantiality conveyed to you—together with the doubt that the emmets crawling upon them could possibly be life-sized men. A drifting daisy-petal meant a smart private steam-yacht. You looked down from two thousand feet above, on the open-lidded snuffboxes that signified the fire-control and signalling-stations of some Leviathan of the Home Fleet, and a string of black holes jabbed in an oval of floating white millboard represented her funnels, black discs or white alternately stood for her ventilators; and her imposing deckworks, her turrets or barbettes, her gun-houses and casemates, and the terrible monsters bloodthirstily nosing out of them, were reduced to a more or less symmetrical arrangement in thick or thin black lines.