"It is he, the crazy pupil!" he cried. "I have seen through my glass the little silk flag he attached to the nacelle. Now you are going to marvel that I still live!"
In a few moments the sound of his motor fell faintly on our ears as a whisper from the clouds. Then—chut!—it stopped, and in a single leap he dived a sheer thousand feet.
That in itself was amazing temerity for one who had flown just long enough to justify him in piloting an aero bus in a dead calm. But I was little prepared for what followed. Instead of continuing his flight horizontally at the end of that headlong dive, this tyro pulled up his elevator, sweeping through a sharp curve into an upward leap with all the dizzy impetus gained in his descent.
The crowd gasped. At my side Georges danced with anxiety upon the turf.
"You are right," I said. "He is certainly crazy, this young Monsieur
Power."
"He calls it the montagnes russes, this trick," said Georges. "I have told him that everybody who ever did it is long dead, with the single exception of yourself, but that to him is entirely equal. See, he has dived again only just in time!"
And, in truth, another moment of upward flight would infallibly have caused him to lose headway, and fall backward, to flatten himself upon the ground. But he had with superb coolness entered upon a second dive of the most impressive, continuing his species of switchback descent until within a few hundred feet of the hangars. I saw his head protruding from the nacelle, incased in a flying helmet of perfectly black leather. At that height the remous and gusts hit him at unexpected angles, and his machine rose and fell and rocked, as if upon the waves of an invisible ocean. It was buffeted about until I knew that he could not be on his seat half the time. First one wing tip and then the other was blown upward, threatening irrevocable side slip, but always at the last moment his instinct—for it could have been nothing else—saved him in masterly fashion.
At one moment, indeed, as he banked high to turn down wind, it seemed that he was lost, and a woman in front of me turned away with a little cry of horror, her hands before her eyes.
But no! Blown like a leaf straight toward us, he wheeled again into the teeth of the wind at the same astonishing angle, finally landing neatly in front of the hangars. It was with an exclamation of relief that I saw him leap from his machine safe and sound.
With a number of mechanicians, I ran to greet him, and he held out a gloved hand, smiling in boyish delight and complete unconcern, and showing all his square, white teeth. I burst at once into protests.