Meanwhile the engines had been humming loudly.
Suddenly she motioned to Collins to stand aside, and then, pulling over one of the levers, she ran along the grass for a short distance and rose gracefully in a long spiral, round and round over the Harbury woods, until the altimeter showed a height of five thousand feet.
Then she studied her map, took her bearings, and, drawing on her ample gauntlet gloves, for it became chilly, she followed a straight line of railway leading due north through Suffolk and Norfolk.
The sky was cloudless, with a slight head-wind. On her right, away in the misty distance, lay the North Sea, whence came a fresh breeze, invigorating after the stifling August morning on land. Deep below she identified villages and towns. Some of the latter were only indicated by palls of smoke, the wind on land being insufficient to disperse them. And over all the grey-green landscape was a strange flatness, for, viewed from above, the country has no contours. It is just a series of grey, green, and brown patchwork with white, snaky lines, denoting roads, and long, grey lines, sometimes disappearing and then reappearing, marking railways and their tunnels; while here and there comes a glint of sunshine upon a river or canal. In the ears there is only the deafening roar of petrol-driven machinery.
Once or twice, through the grey haze which always rises from the earth on a hot morning, Beryl saw the blue line of the sea—that sea so zealously guarded by Britain’s Navy. Then she flew steadily north to the flat fens.
From below, her coming was signalled at several points, and at more than one air-station glasses were levelled at her. But the tri-coloured rings upon the wings reassured our anti-aircraft boys and, though they recognised the machine as one of unusual model, they allowed her to pass, for it was well-known that there were many experimental machines in the air.
Beryl had sought and found upon her map the Great Northern main line, and had followed it from Huntingdon to Peterborough. Afterwards, still following the railway, she went for many miles until, of a sudden, close by a small town which the map told her was called Bourne, in Lincolnshire, her engines showed signs of slackening.
Something was amiss. Her quick ear told her so. A number of misfires occurred. She pulled over another lever, but the result she expected was not apparent. It was annoying that being so near Sleaford she had met with engine trouble—for trouble there undoubtedly was.
At that moment she was flying at fully ten thousand feet, the normal height for a “non-stop run.” Without being at all flurried she decided that it would be judicious to plane down to earth; therefore, putting “The Hornet’s” nose to the wind, she turned slightly eastward, and, as she came down, decided to land upon a wide expanse of brown-green ground—which very soon she distinguished as a piece of flat, rich fenland, in which potatoes were growing.
At last she touched the earth and made a dexterous landing.