"My hat! Dusky as a nigger! But never felt better in my life. Oxygen seems to agree with me, but not with my lovely complexion. Now, what the blazes is a fellow to do? This is a corker." It was worse than that, for not only was the ship in danger of destruction, but without a doubt were her position at that altitude maintained, every soul aboard would be asphyxiated or frozen to death. Dick cast his eye at the barometer. "Twenty-nine thousand feet. Dead level with the summit of the mountain," he reflected. "And ain't she rolling, just?" That, too, was an obvious fact; for, relieved of the weight of the water which had filled her tanks, and which, like the engines, were disposed at the very lowest point possible, the ship now appeared to be a trifle top-heavy. In any case, she careened badly, swaying from side to side, till her decks presented steep slopes down which the figures of helpless members of her crew slithered. Yes, it was an ugly and distressing sight, for that loss of weight, and the fact that her elevating screws would not grip the air, had made the ship unstable in a fore-and-aft direction. To Dick's horror she began a new series of movements. The gust outside freshened of a sudden, just as gales do spring up at the height at which they floated, and at once the giant machine was swung round as if she were a top. Then she rolled heavily, till it was only by clutching at the rails about the motors that he escaped being thrown into them. Later she suddenly careened in the opposite direction, and hoisting her stern on high, projected her crew down the whole length of the gallery so that they were brought up against a distant bulkhead. Nor was that the last of her disconcerting gyrations. The breeze freshened again, till within a minute a whirlwind was singing and screaming outside. It caught the framework of the ship as if she were a leaf, and now that she was lying out of the horizontal, and Joe's curious design was therefore almost inoperable, it swung her to one side and sent her heading madly for the snow and rock-strewn summit of the mountain. Dick held his small remaining breath as the vessel bore down upon that rocky peak, and shivered as she missed it by a narrow margin. "A miss is as good as a mile, sir," someone shouted in his ear, as if the person were a mile away. But Dick was deaf. His ears were singing and roaring, and when he let go his hold of the engine rails he was dreadfully giddy. But, in spite of his deafness, he was able to note two other things. The engine had stopped completely, no doubt because of the position of the ship, the fuel supply having been entirely cut off. Then Hawkins was beside him, not the Hawkins of old, with a clean-shaven face tanned to mahogany by exposure, but a sailor whose skin was of leaden hue, whose eyes were sunken and had lost their sparkle, whose shoulders stooped as if he found it hard to keep upright In other respects it was the old Hawkins.