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From the start I suspected something and I tried to reason it out. Having failed to stop the work, failed to kill Marlowe what was left? Why, the launching. How? I knew of that motor-boat. What else could they do with it? I thought of recent tests that have been made with express cruisers as mine- planters. Could that be the scheme? The air-boat scheme occurred to me late last night.
Eric longed to wave his arms about, and jump up and down to get warm, but he had to cling, still and motionless, to the branches to keep from falling. At last Ivra whispered "It's our turn now," and taking Eric's hand, she made him jump with her right out into cold space. For one awful instant he thought they were both falling down, down to the ground. But they had only dropped into the air-boat.
The moment the great hulk of the Usona in its wild flight to the sea would have hit that mine, tilting it, she would have sunk in a blast of flame. The air-boat now headed for the shore, and a few moments later, as Craig climbed into our stand, Marlowe seized him in congratulation too deep for words. "Is it all right?" sang out one of the men in the gangs, less impressionable than the rest.
The great day came, and the abbe, entering his air-boat amidst the applause of the spectators, began to work the wings with which it was provided with great rapidity. "But," says one who witnessed the feat, "the more he worked, the more his machine cleaved to the earth, as if it were part and parcel of it."
But when we are subjected wholly to a single force, and have no point of support by the use of which to turn that force to our own purposes, as is the case with the aeronaut, we are entirely at the mercy of that force, and must obey it. Galien describes his air-boat, in 1755, in his little work entitled, "The Art of Sailing in the Air."
The balloon, meanwhile, detached itself from its moorings; the physician Charles, seated in the car, gaily saluted the public, and was then majestically launched into space in his air-boat; and at once the old Marechal, beholding this, passed suddenly from unbelief to perfect faith in aerostatics and in the capacity of the human mind, fell on his knees, and, with his eyes bathed in tears, moaned out pitifully the words, "Yes, it is fixed!
Servants were hurrying back and forth carrying trays and their gilt buttons sparkled almost as much as the silver. But how strange were the people! Eric and Ivra and the littlest Forest Child laughed aloud. They were standing about so straight and stiff, holding their cups and saucers, and their voices rising up to the air-boat in confusion sounded like a hundred parrots.
You will have to be present at that scene, I am sorry to say; but you can comfort yourself by ministering to your co-religionist. He has not had a priest admitted to him since his arrest. "Immediately afterwards you will be set at liberty, and put on board the air-boat on which you travelled from Rome, with the same driver who brought you here, on one single condition.
This is what ye brought us here to? The man and you? This? To death and woe? To accidents and perishings? "Ye brought us to hardship and to battle, not to peace! With lies, deceptions and false promises ye enticed us! We were safe and happy in our homes in the Abyss beside the sunless sea, till ye fell thither in your air-boat from these cursed regions. We "
This done, I went down among the ships by the wharves, and fixed upon the first old green air-boat that seemed fairly sound, broke open a near shop, procured some buckets of oil, and by three o'clock had tested and prepared my ship. It was a dull and mournful day, drizzling, chilly.
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