It must never be forgotten that the battleship was upside-down, and that not only had she to be raised, but she also had to be righted. Rivet by rivet and plate by plate she had in the course of years been built up by hundreds of men into one of the strongest structures known. All the rivets and plates had been welded into a compact mass of 24,000 tons which now lay at the bottom of the sea. Afloat, she obeyed the hand and brain of man, would go wherever he desired; at his behest she turned to right or left, sped furiously through the sea or stopped. Now she was immovable as the mountains; to smash her to pieces would have been a gigantic task, costing months of time, tons of much-wanted explosives, and well over £100,000 in money. The queer thing is that Ferrati proposed to harness air to lift the sunken monster, just as though she were an airship instead of a battleship. In such ways do master-minds work. So brilliantly conceived were Ferrati’s plans that orders were at once given to put them into execution. Divers went down to make a survey of the wreck, which was so rent by the explosion that a vast hole had been blown right through her from keel to top deck. A further survey indicated that the huge ship was literally digging her own grave. The weight of the upside-down battleship was all resting on the funnels and gun turrets, and these, owing to the enormous pressure from above, were piercing a way slowly but surely through the mud. Day by day the ship sank lower and lower, until the whole of her upper deck was completely buried and the greater part of her hull at the stern had disappeared. In six months the funnels cut down through a bed of mud over 30 feet thick before they encountered a bed of clay, which arrested the sinking of the ship. [Illustration: THE ITALIANS BRINGING THE LEONARDO DA VINCI UPSIDE DOWN INTO DOCK AT TARANTO ON SEPTEMBER 17, 1919, AFTER FIGHTING FOR OVER TWO YEARS TO RAISE HER FROM THE SEABED] No wonder the experts gave up hope. It really seemed that nothing but a miracle could bring the great vessel to the surface again. There she was, upside-down, buried deep in the clinging mud, an enormous, unwieldly mass that the biggest cranes ever invented were powerless to lift. It is a comparatively easy task to raise a weight of 10 tons from the seabed, but it is quite a different proposition to lift a mountain of metal weighing upwards of 20,000 tons. [Illustration: THE UPSIDE-DOWN BATTLESHIP SAFELY DOCKED ON SEPTEMBER, 18, 1919, WITH THE GIANT PONTOONS WHICH HELPED TO RAISE HER STILL LASHED TO HER SIDES] In no wise discouraged by the difficulties of the problem, General Ferrati and his associate, Major Gianelli, ordered large-sized models of the ship to be built. These were accurately constructed down to the smallest detail, with miniature engines, propellers and guns; and every compartment was loaded to represent the things on board the battleship when she foundered.