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Let us suppose, moreover, that the aerial voyagers, finding this planet to be nothing but a howling wilderness, inhabited by us poor savages and wild beasts, shall take formal possession of it, in the name of his most gracious and philosophic excellency, the Man in the Moon.
The cadet is led by easy steps through the earlier part of the training, and only after he has passed aerial tests in the simpler methods of control is he allowed to continue with the rest of his course and "go solo." The scheme provides that before he goes solo he must have spun, and shown that he can take his instructor out of a spin. Only then is he considered fit to go on his own.
The parachute, released from a part of the weight which had held it steady, careened, was caught by a sidewise gust of wind, and, bellying out like a sail, it dragged the two aerial travelers through the topmost branches in short, vicious jerks which made Stuart feel as though he were being pulled apart.
Night operations, however, have not proved eminently successful. The very darkness which protects the aerial prowler also serves a similar purpose in connection with its prey. But aerial operations under the cover of darkness are guided not so much by the glare of lights from below as betrayal by sound.
And in these her young excellence was still apparent, only the drawings were strange and fantastic: they had a resemblance to those with which the painter Blake, himself a visionary, illustrated the Poems of the "Night Thoughts" and "The Grave," faces of exquisite loveliness, forms of aerial grace, coming forth from the bells of flowers, or floating upwards amidst the spray of fountains, their outlines melting away in fountain or in flower.
It has always seemed to me that the higher one gets, the easier it must be to write; and that, especially at a great elevation, one could strike into lofty themes, and launch out, without fear of shipwreck on any of the earthly headlands, in his aerial voyages.
Rodier turned out to be of a singularly inventive turn of mind, and the two, putting their heads together, evolved after long experiment a type of engine that enabled them to double the speed of the aeroplane. These aerial vessels had already attained a maximum of a hundred miles an hour, for progress had been rapid since Paulhan's epoch-making flight from London to Manchester.
Then he seized the little axe, chopped some branches for spreaders, fastened the aerial wires to them, and added other wires to suspend them by. Quickly he selected two trees for supports, and climbing up first one and then the other, soon had his aerial dangling directly above the fire trail. He coupled up his lead-in wire and ran his eye over the outfit. Everything was complete.
At length all this was devoutly believed; and the new sexton used to exhibit to the curious, for a trifling emolument, a good-sized piece of the church weathercock which had been accidentally kicked off by the aforesaid horse in his aerial flight, and picked up by himself in the churchyard, a year or two afterwards.
Now, many treat this problem of aerial flotation as if it were of the nature of a miracle something not to be explained. Explanations which have been advanced have, it is true, been in many cases altogether untenable.
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