By then we must have climbed to about six thousand feet, although my log shows no record of our height at this stage. Meanwhile, we were still between upper and lower ranges of cloud banks. At a quarter past twelve Alcock took the Vickers-Vimy through the upper range, only to find a third layer of clouds, several thousand feet higher. This, however, was patchy and without continuity, so that I was able to glimpse the stars from time to time. At 12:25 I identified through a gap to north-eastward Vega, which shone very brightly high in the heavens, and the Pole Star. With their help, and that of a cloud horizon that was clearly defined in the moonlight, not far below our level, I used the sextant to fix our position. This I found was latitude 50° 7´ N. and longitude 31° W., showing that we had flown 850 nautical miles, at an average speed of 106 knots. We were slightly to the south of the correct course, which fact I made known to Alcock in a note, with penciled corrections for remedying the deviation. Most of my "dead reckoning" calculations were short of our actual position because, influenced by meteorological predictions based on the weather reports at St. John's, I had allowed for a falling off in the strength of the wind, and this had not occurred. Having found the stars and checked our position and direction, the urgent necessity to continue climbing no longer existed. Alcock had been nursing his engines very carefully, and to reduce the strain on them he let the machine lose height slowly. At 1:20 A. M. we were down to four thousand feet, and an hour later we had dropped yet four hundred feet lower. [Illustration: THE TRANSATLANTIC MACHINE--A VICKERS-VIMY WITH ROLLS-ROYCE ENGINES] The clouds overhead were still patchy, clusters of stars lightening the intervals between them. But the Vickers-Vimy, at its then height, was moving through a sea of fog, which prevented effective observation. This I made known to the pilot in a message: "_Can get no good readings. Observation too indefinite._" The moon was in evidence for about an hour and a half, radiating a misty glow over the semi-darkness and tinging the cloud-tips with variations of silver, gold and soft red. Whenever directly visible it threw the moving shadows of the Vickers-Vimy on to the clouds below. Mostly I could see the moon by looking over the machine's starboard planes. I tried to sight on it for latitude, but the horizon was still too indefinite. An aura of unreality seemed to surround us as we flew onward towards the dawn and Ireland. The fantastic surroundings impinged on my alert consciousness as something extravagantly abnormal--the distorted ball of a moon, the weird half-light, the monstrous cloud-shapes, the fog below and around us, the misty indefiniteness of space, the changeless drone, drone, drone of the motors.