"We're coming near the firing-line," Meriwell said to himself. "We ought to be rising now."
He glanced across to where the steersman stood cowled and rigid at his wheel, his slim, tall form suggested more than defined by the hooded electric lights. Beside him poring over compass and map, his pale lawyer's face showing up like that of a hunting-bird, was the navigating lieutenant. In the shadows, leaning over the edge of the car, as a captain leans over his flying bridge, was the flight commander, old Colonel Sanderson. Meriwell glanced surreptitiously at his square-cut, tow-like beard and bowed engineer's shoulders. They seemed to droop more than ever to-night.
"Poor old skipper!" Meriwell muttered sympathetically.
The guns of the firing-line crashed into the air with heavy, shattering blasts. In the distance there showed the faint shadows of lights. Green shadows, that were lyddite; and infinitesimal pin-points of yellow, that were the flashes of rifles; and the pretty orange of shrapnel; and the blinding white of magnesium flares.
"Eighteen degrees up," the navigating lieutenant ordered. He watched his plumb-line while the steersman heaved on his switch. "Easy! Steady! Right-o!"
The floor of the car tilted like the deck of a steamer rising to the swell. The huge dirigible nosed her way upward like a mounting dragon-fly. They passed through a fleece of cloud that touched them caressingly like soft fingers. The noise of battle beneath them faded into a vibrating bass chord. The propellers purred like giant cats.
"She answered like a blood mare," said the navigator, pride ringing in his voice.
"If only my guns and bombs go as well as your planes," Meriwell told him, "I'll be satisfied."
"They will, never fear," the navigator laughed.
They were all proud of her, navigator, gunnery lieutenant, engineers, and crew. Full-fledged, like Minerva from the head of Jove, she had appeared from the tousled brain of the queer, misshapen Scotch engineer of the Clyde, who had come knocking at the door of the war-office when the slug-shaped Zeppelins were pouring fire on the heart of London and the British airmen were relying on frail, insufficient biplanes—sparrow-hawks competing with eagles. They had, thank God! trusted that little man with the Scots accent and the brier pipe, and here they had her now in the air, three hundred feet of her, a miracle of aluminum and gas and oiled silk, rigid, dependable, fleet as a bullet from a sharpshooter's piece. Meriwell studied her lines through the darkness with a throb of pride: her graceful length, like some wonderful night insect; the wide sweep of her planes, like a jinn's wings, the shelf-like horizontal ones to send her nosing upward like a hawk or to let her down in a gliding sea-gull's swoop, the vertical one like the rudder of a gigantic vessel; the three great baskets, attached to the keel with the trellised runway between them; the four propellers, humming like a nest of bees, two to the forward car, two to the aft; the platform above the many-jointed aluminum-covered balloons, with its emergency bridge and rapid-fire gun.