[7] “Panama Roughneck Ballads.”
[8] See “Building the Panama Canal,”—a group of eight lithographs made by Mr. Pennell for this magazine,—in THE CENTURY for August, 1912.
Drawn by W. M. Berger
“HE OPENED HIS EYES IN SOME FAINT DISTRESS ... AND BLINKED THROUGH HIS GOGGLES” (SEE [PAGE 284])
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LARGER IMAGE
THE SIREN OF THE AIR
BY ALLAN UPDEGRAFF
WHEN his barograph marked twelve thousand feet, Reese pushed the yoke of his warping-wheel forward a few inches, and gave a slight inclination to the foot-bar of the rudder. The monoplane, which had been climbing up into the wind so sharply as to remain almost motionless as far as horizontal progress was concerned, settled to a level keel and began to describe a wide circle, gracefully lifting its outside and lowering its inside wing like a bird when it turns. From behind the trailing edge of the lowered wing, its driver looked down on the creeping expanse of earth two miles below.
The hangars and pylons and crowded stands of the aviation-field were pressed together, made small, blurred, as though seen through the wrong end of a misted telescope. The broad field itself seemed not larger than a lady’s handkerchief; it was almost lost in the blur of villages, boulevards, railroad-tracks, and tree-clumps of the level Long Island country. To north and south, as the great bird swept steadily on its arc, appeared expanses, smooth and polished like metal—the Atlantic and the Sound. Shapes like beetles represented ships.