He looked round in search of von Herrnung, who maintained unchanged the same attitude, his shoulders level, his unseen hands steady as rock upon the wheel of the steering-pillar, his mouth shut tightly, his hard eyes ranging ahead or lowered, as he conned his course in masterly fashion by aid of the roller-map, protected by its transparent, rainproof casing, or the compass, clock, altimeter, and other instruments gimballed in the wooden frame in front of the pilot’s seat. "How long?" the small fist rapped out. Von Herrnung detached a hand and signalled in answer: "One hour!" "When do we go home?" "We go home now!" the hand signalled, and the boy settled down in his seat to wait. Between hunger and weariness he dozed, and soon slept soundly, his hands hanging laxly over the leather arm-rests and his head nodding over the brown satchel lying on his knees. It figured in his dreams as something huge, oppressive and uncanny, that suddenly took to itself malevolent life, spread a pair of wide leathery bat-wings, and would have flown away but that he gripped it fast. "No, no! You shan’t! I promised!" he heard himself crying, and suddenly the thing collapsed limply in his grasp and became nothing but a satchel, and he was awake. Awake and very stiff and rather sick and sleepy, and with the salt smell in his nostrils and the salt taste in his mouth that meant—that could only mean the Sea. He looked over the gunwale and cried out in astonishment. For a vast carpet of rounded woolly-grey-white clouds lay spread beneath. The carpet beginning to rise and the cockpit floor to incline downwards, a thin clammy fog suddenly blotted out everything. The Bird had dived through a field of woolpack mixed with ground-fog. Now flying some hundred feet beneath it, she regained her level, in the clear light stained by the sunset as water in which a dash of red wine is mingled, the light that is the aftermath of a radiant summer’s day. And, with the smell of the sea sharper in his nostrils, the boy became aware of moving, muddy-grey water, with ships and boats and steamers on it, far down below. Now the southerly breeze that had steadily tagged on some twenty-three miles an hour to the Bird’s eighty odd, began to veer and come in strengthening puffs and gusts from the north-west. Swirling eddies of air came upwards from the water, rocking the machine as a swell takes a boat at sea, and splashed upon the frail, silk-covered wings of the aëroplane in deluges of invisible spray.