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Through the yawning gap in the walls below him he could look down upon the packed attentive multitudes in the Hall of the Atlas. The distant flying stages to the south came out bright and vivid, brought nearer as it seemed by an unusual translucency of the air. A solitary aeropile beat up from the central stage as if to meet the coming aeroplanes.
"What do you mean?" asked Graham. "Tell me! What?" "We have driven them out of the under galleries at Norwood, Streatham is afire and burning wildly, and Roehampton is ours. Ours! and we have taken the aeropile that lay thereon." For an instant Graham and Helen stood in silence, their hearts were beating fast, they looked at one another.
And now in that very sky that was once a grey smoke canopy, I circle in an aeropile." During those three days Graham was so occupied with such distractions that the vast political movements in progress outside his quarters had but a small share of his attention. Those about him told him little.
"The aeroplanes are clumsy," he said thoughtfully, "compared with the aeropiles." He turned suddenly to Helen. His decision was made. "I must do it." "Do what?" "Go to this flying stage to this aeropile." "What do you mean?" "I am an aeronaut. After all . Those days for which you reproached me were not wasted." He turned to the old man in yellow. "Put the aeropile upon the guides."
He went striding through the room where the Ward Leader bawled at a telephone directing that the aeropile should be put upon the guides. The man in yellow glanced at Helen's still figure, hesitated and hurried after him. Graham did not once look back, he did not speak until the curtain of the ante-chamber of the great hall fell behind him.
Then rushing under the stern of the aeropile came the Wealden Heights, the line of Hindhead, Pitch Hill, and Leith Hill, with a second row of wind-wheels that seemed striving to rob the downland whirlers of their share of breeze. The purple heather was speckled with yellow gorse, and on the further side a drove of black oxen stampeded before a couple of mounted men.
The fenestrations in the further float flashed open as the aeronaut tried to right her. Beyond, he saw a second aeroplane leaping steeply to escape the whirl of its heeling fellow. The broad area of swaying wings seemed to jerk upward. He felt his aeropile had dropped clear, that the monstrous fabric, clean overturned, hung like a sloping wall above him.
A number of blue figures were coming up these, and swarming across the stage to the aeropile. "We don't want all these fools," said his friend. "They only crowd up and spoil shots. What are they after?" "Ssh! they're shouting something." The two men listened. The swarming new-comers had crowded densely about the aeropile.
"They win," he shouted to the empty air; "the people win!" The sound of a second gun came like an answer. And then he saw the aeropile on Blackheath was running down its guides to launch. It lifted clean and rose. It shot up into the air, driving straight southward and away from him. In an instant it came to him what this meant. It must needs be Ostrog in flight. He shouted and dropped towards it.
But he found the pulsating movement of the aeropile as it drove up the faint south-west breeze was very little in excess of the pitching of a boat head on to broad rollers in a moderate gale, and he was constitutionally a good sailor. And the keenness of the more rarefied air into which they ascended produced a sense of lightness and exhilaration.
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