I made ready for the worst, loosening my safety belt and preparing to salve my notes of the flight. All precautions would probably have been unavailing, however, for had we fallen into the sea, there would have been small hope of survival. We were on a steep slant, and even had we escaped drowning when first submerged, the dice would be heavily loaded against the chance of rescue by a passing ship. And then while these thoughts were chasing each other across my mind, we left the cloud as suddenly as we had entered it. We were now less than a hundred feet from the ocean. The sea-surface did not appear below the machine, but, owing to the wide angle at which we were tilted against the horizontal, seemed to stand up level, sideways to us. Alcock looked at the ocean and the horizon, and almost instantaneously regained his mental equilibrium in relation to external balance. Fortunately the Vickers-Vimy maneuvers quickly, and it responded rapidly to Alcock's action in centralizing the control lever and rudder bar. He opened up the throttles. The motors came back to life, and the danger was past. Once again disaster had been averted by the pilot's level-headedness and skill. When at last the machine swung back to the level and flew parallel with the Atlantic, our height was fifty feet. It appeared as if we could stretch downward and almost touch the great white-caps that crested the surface. With the motors shut off we could actually _hear_ the voice of the cheated ocean as its waves swelled, broke, and swelled again. The compass needle, which had continued to swing, now stabilized itself and quivered toward the west, showing that the end of the spin left us facing America. As we did not want to return to St. John's, and earnestly wanted to reach Ireland, Alcock turned the machine in a wide semi-circle and headed eastward, while climbing away from the ocean and towards the lowest clouds. CHAPTER VI MORNING Sunrise made itself known to us merely as a gradual lightening that showed nothing but clouds, above and below. The sun itself was nowhere visible. We seemed to be flying in and out of dense patches of cloud; for every now and then we would pass through a white mountain, emerge into a small area of clear atmosphere, and then be confronted with another enormous barrier of nebulousness. The indefiniteness of dawn disappointed my hopes of taking observations. Already at three o'clock I had scribbled a note to the pilot: "_Immediately you see sun rising, point machine straight towards it, and we'll get compass bearings._" I had already worked out a table of hours, angles and azimuths of the sun at its rising, to serve as a check upon our position; but, as things happened, I was obliged to resume navigation by means of "dead reckoning."