As they felt the impact of it, it was as if the staunch little craft had run head on into one of those steel nets used during the war for trapping submarines. She struck it and from the very force of the blow, recoiled. The thing she had struck, however, was not a steel net but a mountain of waters flanked by such a volume of wind as is seldom seen on the Atlantic.
"It's the end of the Kittlewake," thought Curlie. "You take care of her," he shouted in Joe's ear, at the same time jerking his thumb at Gladys. The next second he disappeared into the storm.
CHAPTER XX
A SEA ABOVE A SEA
When Alfred Brightwood had tilted the nose of the Stormy Petrel upward and away from the threatening bank of clouds she rose rapidly. A thousand, two thousand, three, four, five thousand feet she mounted to dizzy heights above the sea.
As they mounted, the stars, swinging about in the sky, like incandescent bulbs strung on a wire, made their appearance here and there. They came out rapidly, by twos and threes, by scores and hundreds. In clusters and fantastic figures they swam about in the purple night.
Almost instantly the sea disappeared from beneath them and in its place came a new sea; a sea of dark rushing clouds. Rising two thousand feet above the level of the ocean, this mass of moisture hanging there in the sky took on the appearance of a second sea. As Vincent looked down upon it he found it easy to believe that were they to drop slowly down upon it, they would be seized upon and torn this way, then that by the violence of the storm that was even now raging beneath them, and that their plane would be cast at last, a shapeless mass, upon the real sea which was roaring and raging beneath it.
"How wonderful nature is!" he breathed. "It would be magnificent were it not so terrible."