The compass needle continued to revolve rapidly, showing that the machine was swinging as it dropped; but, still hemmed in as we were by the thick vapor, we could not tell how, or in which direction we were spinning.
Before the pilot could reduce the throttle, the roar of the motors had almost doubled in volume, and instead of the usual 1650 to 1700 revolutions per minute, they were running at about 2200 revolutions per minute. Alcock shut off the throttles, and the vibration ceased.
Apart from the changing levels marked by the aneroid, only the fact that our bodies were pressed tightly against the seats indicated that the machine was falling. How and at what angle it was falling, we knew not. Alcock tried to centralize the controls, but failed because we had lost all sense of what was central. I searched in every direction for an external sign, and saw nothing but opaque nebulousness.
The aneroid, meantime, continued to register a height that dropped ever lower and alarmingly lower—three thousand, two thousand, one thousand, five hundred feet. I realized the possibility that we might hit the ocean at any moment, if the aneroid's exactitude had been affected by differences between the barometric conditions of our present position and those of St. John's, where the instrument was set.
A more likely danger was that our cloud might stretch down to the surface of the ocean; in which case Alcock, having obtained no sight of the horizon, would be unable to counteract the spin in time.
I made ready for the worst, loosening my safety belt and preparing to salve my notes of the flight. All precautions would probably have been unavailing, however, for had we fallen into the sea, there would have been small hope of survival. We were on a steep slant, and even had we escaped drowning when first submerged, the dice would be heavily loaded against the chance of rescue by a passing ship.
And then while these thoughts were chasing each other across my mind, we left the cloud as suddenly as we had entered it. We were now less than a hundred feet from the ocean. The sea-surface did not appear below the machine, but, owing to the wide angle at which we were tilted against the horizontal, seemed to stand up level, sideways to us.
Alcock looked at the ocean and the horizon, and almost instantaneously regained his mental equilibrium in relation to external balance. Fortunately the Vickers-Vimy maneuvers quickly, and it responded rapidly to Alcock's action in centralizing the control lever and rudder bar. He opened up the throttles. The motors came back to life, and the danger was past. Once again disaster had been averted by the pilot's level-headedness and skill.
When at last the machine swung back to the level and flew parallel with the Atlantic, our height was fifty feet. It appeared as if we could stretch downward and almost touch the great white-caps that crested the surface. With the motors shut off we could actually hear the voice of the cheated ocean as its waves swelled, broke, and swelled again.
The compass needle, which had continued to swing, now stabilized itself and quivered toward the west, showing that the end of the spin left us facing America. As we did not want to return to St. John's, and earnestly wanted to reach Ireland, Alcock turned the machine in a wide semi-circle and headed eastward, while climbing away from the ocean and towards the lowest clouds.