It was indeed an extraordinary situation: two aeroplanes wheeling round and round in a cup-like hollow, with less than two hundred feet of space between them. The Kalmucks had not as yet fired or dropped a bomb: Lawrence imagined them gloating over their helpless victim, awaiting a favourable moment for one crushing stroke. The first shot was fired by Fazl; the enemy replied, but instead of keeping up a continuous fire, they ceased after a few shots, which riddled the planes, but hit no vital part. Lawrence wondered at their abstinence, until, following them with his eyes, he had a sudden conviction that they were in difficulties. The machine was banked up to the extreme limit of safety, and it flashed upon him that the enemy, and not himself, were caged. They could not ascend, for, a few hundred feet above them, the cliff on the west side of the stream hung forward in a jagged bluff that came within the circle of their flight. Contact with it would hurl them into the river. Nor could they leave the bay by either of the exits north or south without the risk of colliding with the cliffs, for the space was so narrow, and the speed of the machine so great, that the movements necessary for unbanking and steering could hardly be performed in the fraction of a second between their quitting the bay and running into the straight. It is one thing for a wasp to fly into a bottle, and quite another to fly out again. The machines had completed several circles before Lawrence had grasped the situation. During this time Fazl had been steadily firing, but the enemy had been silent. Suddenly the Gurkha uttered a shout; one of the Kalmucks fell from the aeroplane, and whirled over and over in the air until he struck the river and disappeared. "Don’t fire again!" cried Lawrence. He had become conscious that the perpendicular distance between the two planes was rapidly diminishing. The enemy’s engine had not failed; their speed was the same; yet it was plain that moment by moment they were drawing nearer to the plane below. If the machines had been ships, Lawrence would have been tempted to believe that the enemy were trying to board; but he knew that a collision would be fatal to both. He was at a loss to explain the strange movement; indeed, he had little time to think of it, for he realised that unless he himself made his escape, his machine would be soon hurled to the bottom by the impact of the larger. He had not found it necessary to bank so much as the Kalmuck pilot. His lesser speed and the greater handiness of his aeroplane enabled him to fly out at the exit without the almost certainty of dashing against the cliff. At his next round he steered straight through the northern gap, and flew back in a flush of wonder and excitement to the platform.