“Didn’t know the glass could drop so low,” he mumbled. “Nasty weather coming. Can’t float on that water. Better climb back up.”
Slowly the plane climbed skyward again. When she had reached a high altitude, with the suddenness of thought she ceased to climb.
It was as if she had run, head on, into an immense filmy veil of silk that hung from the high heavens, its fringe touching the sea. The veil was dark, the darkness of midnight blue. It seized the plane and set it twirling, whirling, pitching, plunging. It was as if a giant hand had seized the veil from above and twisted it, as one twists a damp towel to wring it.
It was then that Pant at the wheel lost all control. Johnny, in the cabin, became an over-large punching-bag. Harnessed to his seat from every side, he swung now into space, and now jammed hard into place, to feel himself banged against the side of the narrow cabin. With head sunk limply forward, with his whole body relaxed, he waited dumbly for the end. What that end might be, he could not even guess. They were caught in a typhoon, hundreds of miles from land, somewhere in mid-Pacific.
CHAPTER IX
A PLANE IN A TYPHOON
When they struck the typhoon Johnny had the courage to hope that Pant might bring them out of it in safety. This, however, seemed scarcely believable. The cabin, a moment before stuffy as a clothes closet, was now as breezy as a mosquito-bar tent in a stiff wind. She was battened tight, too. The mad whirl of the plane made Johnny dizzy and sick. His ears were full of strange sounds. The creak and groan of planes, stays and guys, that seemed about to snap, was mingled with the thunder of the engines. Above all this, like the voice of some mad siren’s spirit filled with hatred and revenge, rang out the shrill scream of the wind. Johnny’s eyes were blinded by strange weird lights—red, yellow and purple—flash upon flash.
“Must be in the midst of the gigantic smithy where lightning bolts are forged,” he grumbled, as he closed his eyes tight and took one more mad whirl that it seemed must be the craft’s last.
But at that, the seemingly last moment, the whirling gale took a strange turn. The plane hung motionless in mid-air. By good fortune she stood right side up. Her planes were as yet unimpaired.
She was a staunch craft. Not a stick, nor wire, nor screw but had been tested and doubly inspected before they went into her. Her two twelve-cylinder engines, lying one beside the other above the fuselage, were bound and braced from every side. Johnny thought of all this as they lay there suspended in space.
It was a lull; he understood that well enough. A strange lull it was, too, as if the storm had taken their frail craft into its gigantic fist, as an ape holds a fledgling bird in his horny claw before crashing it against the trunk of a tree.