In a minute or so the drumming in my ears grew less violent. Dalmahoy bent over the aeronaut, who was bleeding at the nose and now began to breathe stertorously. Sheepshanks had fallen into placid slumber. I kept the valve open until we descended into a stratum of fog--from which, no doubt, the _Lunardi_ had lately risen: the moisture collected here would account for its congelated coat of silver. By and by, still without rising, we were quit of the fog, and the moon swept the hollow beneath us, rescuing solitary scraps and sheets of water and letting them slip again like imprehensible ghosts. Small fiery eyes opened and shut on us; cressets of flame on factory chimneys, more and more frequent. I studied the compass. Our course lay south-by-west. But our whereabouts? Dalmahoy, being appealed to, suggested Glasgow: and thenceforward I let him alone. Byfield snored on. I pulled out my watch, which I had forgotten to wind; and found it run down. The hands stood at twenty minutes past four. Daylight, then, could not be far off. Eighteen hours--say twenty: and Byfield had guessed our rate at one time to be thirty miles an hour. Five hundred miles---- A line of silver ahead: a ribbon drawn taut across the night, clean-edged, broadening--the sea! In a minute or two I caught the murmur of the coast. "Five hundred miles," I began to reckon again, and a holy calm dawned on me as the _Lunardi_ swept high over the fringing surf, and its voice faded back with the glimmer of a whitewashed fishing-haven. I roused Dalmahoy and pointed. "The sea!" "Looks like it. Which, I wonder?" "The English Channel, man." "I say--are you sure?" "Eh?" exclaimed Byfield, waking up and coming forward with a stagger. "The English Channel." "The French fiddlestick," said he with equal promptness. "O, have it as you please!" I retorted. It was not worth arguing with the man. "What is the hour?" I told him that my watch had run down. His had done the same. Dalmahoy did not carry one. We searched the still prostrate Sheepshanks: his had stopped at ten minutes to four. Byfield replaced it and underlined his disgust with a kick. "A nice lot!" he ejaculated. "I owe you my thanks, Mr. Ducie, all the same. It was touch and go with us, and my head's none the better for it." "But I say," expostulated Dalmahoy. "France! This is getting past a joke." "So you are really beginning to discover that, are you?" Byfield stood, holding by a rope, and studied the darkness ahead. Beside him I hugged my convictions--hour after hour, it seemed; and still the dawn did not come. He turned at length. "I see a coast line to the south of us. This will be the Bristol Channel: and the balloon is sinking. Pitch out some ballast if these idiots have left any."