Still they circled and circled with great, untiring sweeps. At last, releasing the searchlight, Vincent put his lips to a speaking tube.
"Let's light," he grumbled. "I'm dead. What's the use?"
"What else can we do but keep looking?" Alfred answered.
"Take a look at the gas. Maybe it will carry us back."
Even as he spoke, a strange thing happened. The air appeared suddenly to have dropped from beneath the plane. Straight down for fifty feet she dropped.
With the utmost difficulty Alfred succeeded in preventing her from taking a nose dive into the sea.
"She—she bumped," he managed to pant at last. "Something the matter with the air."
And indeed there was something about the atmospheric conditions which they had not sensed. Busy as they had been they had not seen the black bank of clouds to the northeast of them. With the wild rush of air from sheer speed, they had not felt the increasing strength of the gale. Once Vincent had fancied that the sea, far beneath them, seemed disturbed, but so far beneath them was it that he could not tell.
Now in surprise and consternation, as if to steady his reeling brain, he gripped the fuselage beside him while he shrilled into the tube:
"Look! Look over there! Lightning!"