“Am I Master of the earth?” he said.  “Or is your Society?  Now.  Take your hands off those levers, and hold my wrists.  Yes—­so.  And now, how do we turn her nose down to the glide?”

“Sire,” said the aeronaut.

“What is it?”

“You will protect me?”

“Lord!  Yes!  If I have to burn London.  Now!”

And with that promise Graham bought his first lesson in aerial navigation.  “It’s clearly to your advantage, this journey,” he said with a loud laugh—­for the air was like strong wine—­“to teach me quickly and well.  Do I pull this?  Ah!  So!  Hullo!”

“Back, Sire!  Back!”

“Back—­right.  One—­two—­three—­good God!  Ah!  Up she goes!  But this is living!”

And now the machine began to dance the strangest figures in the air.  Now it would sweep round a spiral of scarcely a hundred yards diameter, now rush up into the air and swoop down again, steeply, swiftly, falling like a hawk, to recover in a rushing loop that swept it high again.  In one of these descents it seemed driving straight at the drifting park of balloons in the southeast, and only curved about and cleared them by a sudden recovery of dexterity.  The extraordinary swiftness and smoothness of the motion, the extraordinary effect of the rarefied air upon his constitution, threw Graham into a careless fury.

But at last a queer incident came to sober him, to send him flying down once more to the crowded life below with all its dark insoluble riddles.  As he swooped, came a tap and something flying past, and a drop like a drop of rain.  Then as he went on down he saw something like a white rag whirling down in his wake.  “What was that?” he asked.  “I did not see.”

The aeronaut glanced, and then clutched at the lever to recover, for they were sweeping down.  When the monoplane was rising again he drew a deep breath and replied, “That,” and he indicated the white thing still fluttering down, “was a swan.”

“I never saw it,” said Graham.

The aeronaut made no answer, and Graham saw little drops upon his forehead.

They drove horizontally while Graham clambered back to the passenger’s place out of the lash of the wind.  And then came a swift rush down, with the wind-screw whirling to check their fall, and the flying stage growing broad and dark before them.  The sun, sinking over the chalk hills in the west, fell with them, and left the sky a blaze of gold.

Soon men could be seen as little specks.  He heard a noise coming up to meet him, a noise like the sound of waves upon a pebbly beach, and saw that the roofs about the flying stage were dense with his people rejoicing over his safe return.  A black mass was crushed together under the stage, a darkness stippled with innumerable faces, and quivering with the minute oscillation of waved white handkerchiefs and waving hands.

CHAPTER XVII