Byfield stood, holding by a rope, and studied the darkness ahead. Beside him I hugged my convictions—hour after hour, it seemed; and still the dawn did not come.
He turned at length.
“I see a coast line to the south of us. This will be the Bristol Channel: and the balloon is sinking. Pitch out some ballast if these idiots have left any.”
I found a couple of sand bags and emptied them overboard. The coast, as a matter of fact, was close at hand. But the Lunardi rose in time to clear the cliff barrier by some hundreds of feet. A wild sea ran on it: of its surf, as of a grey and agonising face, we caught one glimpse as we hurled high and clear over the roar: and, a minute later, to our infinite dismay, were actually skimming the surface of a black hillside. “Hold on!” screamed Byfield, and I had barely time to tighten my grip when crash! the car struck the turf and pitched us together in a heap on the floor. Bump! the next blow shook us like peas in a bladder. I drew my legs up and waited for the third.
None came. The car gyrated madly and swung slowly back to equilibrium. We picked ourselves up, tossed rugs, coats, instruments, promiscuously overboard, and mounted again. The chine of the tall hill, our stumbling-block, fell back and was lost, and we swept forward into formless shadow.
“Confound it!” said Byfield, “the land can’t be uninhabited!”
It was, for aught we could see. Not a light showed anywhere; and to make things worse the moon had abandoned us. For one good hour we swept through chaos to the tuneless lamentations of Sheepshanks, who declared that his collar-bone was broken.
Then Dalmahoy flung a hand upwards. Night lay like a sack around and below us: but right aloft, at the zenith, day was trembling. Slowly established, it spread and descended upon us until it touched a distant verge of hills, and there, cut by the rim of the rising sun, flowed suddenly with streams of crimson.
“Over with the grapnel!” Byfield sprang to the valve-string and pulled; and the featureless earth rushed up towards us.