We had just cleared the Mark Boat and her disorderly neighbours when the storm ended as suddenly as it had begun. A shooting-star to northward filled the sky with the green blink of a meteorite dissipating itself in our atmosphere.
Said George: "That may iron out all the tensions." Even as he spoke, the conflicting winds came to rest; the levels filled; the laterals died out in long, easy swells; the air-ways were smoothed before us. In less than three minutes the covey round the Mark Boat had shipped their power-lights and whirred away upon their businesses.
"What's happened?" I gasped. The nerve-store within and the volt-tingle without had passed: my inflators weighed like lead.
"God, He knows!" said Captain George soberly "That old shooting-star's skin-friction has discharged the different levels. I've seen it happen before. Phew: What a relief!"
We dropped from ten to six thousand and got rid of our clammy suits. Tim shut off and stepped out of the Frame. The Mark Boat was coming up behind us. He opened the colloid in that heavenly stillness and mopped his face.
"Hello, Williams!" he cried. "A degree or two out o' station, ain't you?"
"May be," was the answer from the Mark Boat. "I've had some company this evening."
"So I noticed. Wasn't that quite a little draught?"
"I warned you. Why didn't you pull out north? The east-bound packets have."
"Me? Not till I'm running a Polar consumptives' sanatorium boat. I was squinting through a colloid before you were out of your cradle, my son."
"I'd be the last man to deny it," the captain of the Mark Boat replies softly. "The way you handled her just now--I'm a pretty fair judge of traffic in a volt-hurry--it was a thousand revolutions beyond anything even I've ever seen."
Tim's back supples visibly to this oiling. Captain George on the c. p. winks and points to the portrait of a singularly attractive maiden pinned up on Tim's telescope bracket above the steering-wheel.
I see. Wholly and entirely do I see!
There is some talk overhead of "coming round to tea on Friday," a brief report of the derelict's fate, and Tim volunteers as he descends: "For an A. B. C. man young Williams is less of a high-tension fool than some. Were you thinking of taking her on, George? Then I'll just have a look round that port-thrust seems to me it's a trifle warm--and we'll jog along."
The Mark Boat hums off joyously and hangs herself up in her appointed eyrie. Here she will stay a shutterless observatory; a life-boat station; a salvage tug; a court of ultimate appeal-cum-meteorological bureau for three hundred miles in all directions, till Wednesday next when her relief slides across the stars to take her buffeted place. Her black hull, double conning-tower, and ever-ready slings represent all that remains to the planet of that odd old word authority. She is responsible only to the Aerial Board of Control the A. B. C. of which Tim speaks so flippantly. But that semi-elected, semi-nominated body of a few score of persons of both sexes, controls this planet. "Transportation is Civilisation," our motto runs. Theoretically, we do what we please so long as we do not interfere with the traffic AND ALL IT IMPLIES. Practically , the A. B. C. confirms or annuls all international arrangements and, to judge from its last report, finds our tolerant, humorous, lazy little planet only too ready to shift the whole burden of public administration on its shoulders.
I discuss this with Tim, sipping mate on the c. p. while George fans her along over the white blur of the Banks in beautiful upward curves of fifty miles each. The dip-dial translates them on the tape in flowing freehand.
Tim gathers up a skein of it and surveys the last few feet, which record "162's" path through the volt-flurry.
"I haven't had a fever-chart like this to show up in five years," he says ruefully.
A postal packet's dip-dial records every yard of every run. The tapes then go to the A. B. C., which collates and makes composite photographs of them for the instruction of captains. Tim studies his irrevocable past, shaking his head.
"Hello! Here's a fifteen-hundred-foot drop at fifty-five degrees! We must have been standing on our heads then, George."
"You don't say so," George answers. "I fancied I noticed it at the time."
George may not have Captain Purnall's catlike swiftness, but he is all an artist to the tips of the broad fingers that play on the shunt-stops. The delicious flight-curves come away on the tape with never a waver. The Mark Boat's vertical spindle of light lies down to eastward, setting in the face of the following stars. Westward, where no planet should rise, the triple verticals of Trinity Bay (we keep still to the Southern route) make a low-lifting haze. We seem the only thing at rest under all the heavens; floating at ease till the earth's revolution shall turn up our landing-towers.
And minute by minute our silent clock gives us a sixteen-second mile.
"Some fine night," says Tim, "we'll be even with that clock's Master."
"He's coming now," says George, over his shoulder. "I'm chasing the night west."
The stars ahead dim no more than if a film of mist had been drawn under unobserved, but the deep airboom on our skin changes to a joyful shout.
"The dawn-gust," says Tim. "It'll go on to meet the Sun. Look! Look! There's the dark being crammed back over our bows! Come to the after-colloid. I'll show you something."
The engine-room is hot and stuffy; the clerks in the coach are asleep, and the Slave of the Ray is ready to follow them. Tim slides open the aft colloid and reveals the curve of the world--the ocean's deepest purple--edged with fuming and intolerable gold.
Then the Sun rises and through the colloid strikes out our lamps. Tim scowls in his face.
"Squirrels in a cage," he mutters. "That's all we are. Squirrels in a cage! He's going twice as fast as us. Just you wait a few years, my shining friend, and we'll take steps that will amaze you. We'll Joshua you!"
Yes, that is our dream: to turn all earth into the Yale of Ajalon at our pleasure. So far, we can drag out the dawn to twice its normal length in these latitudes. But some day--even on the Equator--we shall hold the Sun level in his full stride.
Now we look down on a sea thronged with heavy traffic. A big submersible breaks water suddenly. Another and another follows with a swash and a suck and a savage bubbling of relieved pressures. The deep-sea freighters are rising to lung up after the long night, and the leisurely ocean is all patterned with peacock's eyes of foam.
"We'll lung up, too," says Tim, and when we return to the c. p. George shuts off, the colloids are opened, and the fresh air sweeps her out. There is no hurry. The old contracts (they will be revised at the end of the year) allow twelve hours for a run which any packet can put behind her in ten. So we breakfast in the arms of an easterly slant which pushes us along at a languid twenty.
To enjoy life, and tobacco, begin both on a sunny morning half a mile or so above the dappled Atlantic cloud-belts and after a volt-flurry which has cleared and tempered your nerves. While we discussed the thickening traffic with the superiority that comes of having a high level reserved to ourselves, we heard (and I for the first time) the morning hymn on a Hospital boat.
She was cloaked by a skein of ravelled fluff beneath us and we caught the chant before she rose into the sunlight. "Oh, ye Winds of God," sang the unseen voices: "bless ye the Lord! Praise Him and magnify Him for ever!"
We slid off our caps and joined in. When our shadow fell across her great open platforms they looked up and stretched out their hands neighbourly while they sang. We could see the doctors and the nurses and the white-button-like faces of the cot-patients. She passed slowly beneath us, heading northward, her hull, wet with the dews of the night, all ablaze in the sunshine. So took she the shadow of a cloud and vanished, her song continuing. "Oh, ye holy and humble men of heart, bless ye the Lord! Praise Him and magnify Him for ever."
"She's a public lunger or she wouldn't have been singing the Benedicite; and she's a Greenlander or she wouldn't have snow-blinds over her colloids," said George at last. "She'll be bound for Frederikshavn or one of the
Glacier sanatoriums for a month.
If she was an accident ward she'd be hung up at the eight-thousand-foot level. Yes--consumptives."
"Funny how the new things are the old thing I've read in books," Tim answered, "that savages used to haul their sick and wounded up to the tops of hills because microbes were fewer there. We hoist 'em in sterilized air for a while. Same idea. How much do the doctors say we've added to the average life of man?"
"Thirty years," says George with a twinkle in his eye. "Are we going to spend 'em all up here, Tim?"
"Flap ahead, then. Flap ahead. Who's hindering?" the senior captain laughed, as we went in.
We held a good lift to clear the coastwise and Continental shipping; and we had need of it. Though our route is in no sense a populated one, there is a steady trickle of traffic this way along. We met Hudson Bay furriers out of the Great Preserve, hurrying to make their departure from Bonavista with sable and black fox for the insatiable markets. We overcossed Keewatin liners, small and cramped; but their captains, who see no land between Trepassy and Lanco, know what gold they bring back from West Erica. Trans-Asiatic Directs we met, soberly ringing the world round the Fiftieth Meridian at an honest seventy knots; and white-painted Ackroyd & Hunt fruiters out of the south fled beneath us, their ventilated hulls whistling like Chinese kites. Their market is in the North among the northern sanatoria where you can smell their grape-fruit and bananas across the cold snows. Argentine beef boats we sighted too, of enormous capacity and unlovely outline. They, too, feed the northern health stations in icebound ports where submersibles dare not rise.
Yellow-bellied ore-flats and Ungava petrol-tanks punted down leisurely out of the north, like strings of unfrightened wild duck. It does not pay to "fly" minerals and oil a mile farther than is necessary; but the risks of transhipping to submersibles in the ice pack off Nain or Hebron are so great that these heavy freighters fly down to Halifax direct, and scent the air as they go. They are the biggest tramps aloft except the Athabasca grain-tubs. But these last, now that the wheat is moved, are busy, over the world's shoulder, timber-lifting in Siberia.
We held to the St. Lawrence (it is astonishing how the old water-ways still pull us children of the air), and followed his broad line of black between its drifting iceblocks, all down the Park that the wisdom of our fathers--but every one knows the Quebec run.
We dropped to the Heights Receiving Towers twenty minutes ahead of time, and there hung at ease till the Yokohama Intermediate Packet could pull out and give us our proper slip. It was curious to watch the action of the holding-down clips all along the frosty river front as the boats cleared or came to rest. A big Hamburger was leaving Pont Levis and her crew, unshipping the platform railings, began to sing "Elsinore"--the oldest of our chanteys. You know it of course:
Mother Rugen's tea-house on the Baltic Forty couple waltzing on the floor! And you can watch my Ray, For I must go away And dance with Ella Sweyn at Elsinore!
Then, while they sweated home the covering-plates:
Nor-Nor-Nor-Nor West from Sourabaya to the Baltic-- Ninety knot an hour to the Skaw! Mother Rugen's tea-house on the Baltic And a dance with Ella Sweyn at Elsinore!
The clips parted with a gesture of indignant dismissal, as though Quebec, glittering under her snows, were casting out these light and unworthy lovers. Our signal came from the Heights. Tim turned and floated up, but surely then it was with passionate appeal that the great tower arms flung open--or did I think so because on the upper staging a little hooded figure also opened her arms wide toward her father?
In ten seconds the coach with its clerks clashed down to the receiving-caisson; the hostlers displaced the engineers at the idle turbines, and Tim, prouder of this than all, introduced me to the maiden of the photograph on the shelf. "And by the way," said he to her, stepping forth in sunshine under the hat of civil life, "I saw young Williams in the Mark Boat. I've asked him to tea on Friday."
AERIAL BOARD OF CONTROL Lights
No changes in English Inland lights for week ending Dec. 18th.
CAPE VERDE--Week ending Dec. 18. Verde inclined guide-light changes from 1st proximo to triple flash--green white green--in place of occulting red as heretofore. The warning light for Harmattan winds will be continuous vertical glare (white) on all oases of trans-Saharan N. E. by E. Main Routes.
INVERCARGIL (N. Z.)--From 1st prox.: extreme southerly light (double red) will exhibit white beam inclined 45 degrees on approach of Southerly Buster. Traffic flies high off this coast between April and October.
TABLE BAY--Devil's Peak Glare removed to Simonsberg. Traffic making Table Mountain coastwise keep all lights from Three Anchor Bay at least two thousand feet under, and do not round to till East of E. shoulder Devil's Peak.
SANDHEADS LIGHT -Green triple vertical marks new private landing-stage for Bay and Burma traffic only.
SNAEFELL JOKUL--White occulting light withdrawn for winter.
PATAGONIA--No summer light south Cape Pilar. This includes Staten Island and Port Stanley.
C. NAVARIN--Quadruple fog flash (white), one minute intervals (new).
EAST CAPE--Fog--flash -single white with single bomb, 30 sec. intervals (new).
MALAYAN ARCHIPELAGO--Lights unreliable owing eruptions. Lay from Cape Somerset to Singapore direct, keeping highest levels.
For the Board:
CATTERTHUN } ST. JUST } Lights. VAN HEDDER }
Casualties
Week ending Dec. 18th.
SABLE ISLAND--Green single barbette-tower freighter, number indistinguishable, up-ended, and fore-tank pierced after collision, passed 300-ft. level Q P. as. Dec. 15th. Watched to water and pithed by Mark Boat.
N. F. BANKS--Postal Packet 162 reports Halma freighter (Fowey--St. John's) abandoned, leaking after weather, 46 151 N. 50 15' W. Crew rescued by Planet liner Asteroid. Watched to water and pithed by Postal Packet, Dec. 14th.
KERGUELEN, MARK BOAT reports last call from Cymena freighter (Gayer Tong Huk & Co.) taking water and sinking in snow-storm South McDonald Islands. No wreckage recovered. Messages and wills of crew at all A. B. C. offices.
FEZZAN--T. A. D. freighter Ulema taken ground during Harmattan on Akakus Range. Under plates strained. Crew at Ghat where repairing Dec. 13th.
BISCAY, MARK BOAT reports Caducci (Valandingham Line) slightly spiked in western gorge Point de Benasdue. Passengers transferred Andorra (Fulton Line). Barcelona Mark Boat salving cargo Dec. 12th.
ASCENSION, MARE BOAT--Wreck of unknown racing-plane, Parden rudder, wire-stiffened xylonite vans, and Harliss engine-seating, sighted and salved 7 20' S. 18 41' W. Dec. 15th. Photos at all A. B. C. offices.
Missing
No answer to General Call having been received during the last week from following overdues, they are posted as missing:
Atlantis, W.17630 . Canton--Valparaiso Audhumla W. 889 . Stockholm--Odessa Berenice, W. 2206 .. . Riga--Vladivostock Draw, E. 446 . . Coventry--Pontes Arenas Tontine, E. 5068 . C. Wrath--Ungava Wu-Sung, E. 41776 . . Hankow--Lobito Bay
General Call (all Mark Boats) out for:
Jane Eyre, W. 6990 . Port Rupert--City of Mexico Santander, W. 6514 . . Gobi Desert--Manila Y. Edmundsun, E. 9690 . . Kandahar--Fiume
Broke for Obstruction, and Quitting Levels
VALKYRIE (racing plane), A. J. Hartley owner, New York (twice warned). GEISHA (racing plane), S. van Cott owner, Philadelphia (twice warned). MARVEL of PERU (racing plane), J. X. Peixoto owner, Rio de Janeiro (twice warned). For the Board:
LAZAREFF } McKEOUGH } Traffic GOLDBRATT }
NOTES High-Level Sleet
The Northern weather so far shows no sign of improvement. From all quarters come complaints of the unusual prevalence of sleet at the higher levels. Racing planes and digs alike have suffered severely--the former from 'unequal deposits of half-frozen slush on their vans (and only those who have "held up" a badly balanced plane in a cross-wind know what that means), and the latter from loaded bows and snow-cased bodies. As a consequence, the Nort
hern and North-western upper levels have been practically abandoned, and the high fliers have returned to the ignoble security of the Three, Five, and Six hundred foot levels. But there remain a few undaunted sun-hunters who, in spite of frozen stays and ice-jammed connecting-rods, still haunt the blue empyrean.
Bat-Boat Racing
The scandals of the past few years have at last moved the yachting world to concerted action in regard to "bat" boat racing. We have been treated to the spectacle of what are practically keeled racing-planes driven a clear five foot or more above the water, and only eased down to touch their so-called " native element" as they near the line. Judges and starters have been conveniently blind to this absurdity, but the public demonstration off St. Catherine's Light at the Autumn Regattas has borne ample, if tardy, fruit. In the future the "bat" is to be a boat, and the long-unheeded demand of the true sportsman for "no daylight under mid-keel in smooth water" is in a fair way to be conceded. The new rule severely restricts plane area and lift alike. The gas compartments are permitted both fore and aft, as in the old type, but the water-ballast central tank is rendered obligatory. These things work, if not for perfection, at least for the evolution of a sane and wholesome waterborne cruiser. The type of rudder is unaffected by the new rules, so we may expect to see the Long-Davidson make (the patent on which has just expired) come largely into use henceforward, though the strain on the sternpost in turning at speeds over forty miles an hour is admittedly very severe. But bat-boat racing has a great future before it.
Crete and the A. B. C.
The story of the recent Cretan crisis, as told in the A. B. C. Monthly Report, is not without humour. Till the 25th October Crete, as all our planet knows, was the sole surviving European repository of "autonomous institutions," "local self-government," and the rest of the archaic lumber devised in the past for the confusion of human affairs. She has lived practically on the tourist traffic attracted by her annual pageants of Parliaments, Boards, Municipal Councils, etc., etc. Last summer the islanders grew wearied, as their premier explained, of "playing at being savages for pennies," and proceeded to pull down all the landing-towers on the island and shut off general communication till such time as the A. B. C. should annex them. For side-splitting comedy we would refer our readers to the correspondence between the Board of Control and the Cretan premier during the "war." However, all's well that ends well. The A. B. C. have taken over the administration of Crete on normal lines; and tourists must go elsewhere to witness the"debates," "resolutions," and "popular movements" of the old days. The only people to suffer will be the Board of Control, which is grievously overworked already. It is easy enough to condemn the Cretans for their laziness; but when one recalls the large, prosperous, and presumably public-spirited communities which during the last few years have deliberately thrown themselves into the hands of the A. B. C., one, cannot be too hard upon St. Paul's old friends.
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