Then the thunder of the engines ceased; Pant had foreseen the ultimate end of the struggle and had prepared himself for it.
The plane swung around, square with the wind, then began a glide which increased in speed with each fraction of a second. Pant was dragged from his seat by the mere force of the air. With nostrils flattened, eyes closed, body bent like a western rider’s, as he is thrown in the air by a bucking bronco, he still clung to the wheel and guided the craft as best he could.
Feeling himself constantly drawn to the right, he realized that they were not gliding straight downward, but were following a gigantic spiral—perhaps miles across. He shuddered. He had experienced something similar to this in his boyhood days—the spiral glide of the amusement park. Yet that was child’s play. This was grim reality, and at the end of the glide lay the remorseless, plunging sea.
Johnny Thompson and the Professor sat in their cabin, too much overcome to move or speak. Through Johnny’s mind there ran many wild thoughts. Now the past, his home, his friends, his mother, were mirrored before his mind’s vision. The next he was contemplating freeing himself from his harness and opening the cabin door. To be trapped in that cabin, strapped to his seat, as they took the plunge into the sea, would be terrible. Better that he might have one fierce battle with the ocean. Yet there was still a chance—a ghost of a chance—some startling development that might save them. Then, if he were loose in the cabin, the cabin door open, he would be shaken out to his death while the plane flew on to safety.
He ended by doing nothing at all, and the plane, holding true to her spiral glide, swung on toward the dark waters. The spiral seemed endless. One might almost have imagined that the storm had an upward twist and was shooting them toward the skies.
A moment’s flash of lightning undeceived them. The sea lay close beneath them, perilously close; almost it appeared to be lifting up hands to grasp them.
Johnny Thompson at last began to struggle with his harness. Pant licked his lips with his tongue and thereby received a revelation. The moisture on his lips was salt; they were in the midst of the salt spray of some titanic wave. The end was not far off.
In desperation he kicked the engines into gear. There followed a moment of suspense. Thinking of it afterward, not one of the three could account for what followed. Perhaps the current of air created by some on-rushing wave had lifted them; perhaps the very force of the powerful engines had torn them from the grip of the remorseless spiral glide. Whatever it was, they suddenly found themselves booming along over the raging sea, and with each hundred yards covered there came a lessening of the wind’s violence. It seemed that they were truly on their way to safety.
Johnny started as from a revery. The signal from the Professor’s speaking-tube was screaming insistently.
“Hello!” he shouted hoarsely.