CHAPTER XIV

STORM BIRDS

The first slow light of day, “under the opening eyelids of the morn,” found the Master up in the screened observation gallery at the tip of the port aileron.  Here were mounted two of the six machine-guns that comprised Nissr’s heavier armament; and here, too, were hung a dozen of the wonderful life-preservers—­combination anti-gravity turbines and vacuum-belt, each containing a signal-light, a water-distiller and condensed foods—­that, invented by Brixton Hewes, soon after the close of the war, had done so much to make air-travel safe.

Major Bohannan was with the Master.  Both men, now in uniform, showed little effect of the sleepless night they had passed.  Wine of excitement and stern duties to perform, joined with powerful bodies, made sleeplessness and labor trivialities.

For an hour the two had been standing there, wrapped in their long military overcoats, while Nissr had swooped on her appointed ways, with hurtling trajectory that had cleft the dark.  Somewhat warmed by piped exhaust-gases though the glass-enclosed gallery had been, still the cold had been marked; for without, in the stupendous gulf of emptiness that had been rushing away beneath and all about them, no doubt the thermometer would have sunk below zero.

Nissr’s altitude was now very great, ranging between 17,500 and 21,000 feet, so as to take advantage of the steady eastward setting wind in the higher air-lanes.  A hard, frozen moonlight, from the steely disk sinking down the western sky, had slashed ink-black shadows of struts and stanchions across the gallery, and had flung Nissr’s larger shadow down the hungering abysses of the sky that yawned beneath.

That shadow had danced and quivered at fantastic speed across dazzling moonlit fields of cloud, ever keeping pace with the Sky Eagle, now leaping across immense and silent drifts of white, now plunging, vanishing into black abysses that showed the ocean spinning backward, ever backward toward the west.

With the coming of dawn, the shadow had faded, and the watchers’ eyes had been turned ahead for some first sight of the out-riders of the attacking fleets.  Bohannan, a little nervous in spite of his well-seasoned fighting-blood, had smoked a couple of cigars in the sheltered gallery, pacing up and down with coat-collar about his ears and with hands thrust deep in pockets.  The Master, likewise muffled, had refused all proffers of tobacco and had contented himself with a few khat leaves.

Silence had, for the most part, reigned between them.  Up here in the gallery, conversation was not easy.  The hurricane of Nissr’s flight shrieked at times with shrill stridor and with whistlings as of a million witches bound for some infernal Sabbath on the Matterhorn.  A good deal of vibration and of shuddering whipped the wing-tip, too; all was different, here, from the calm warmth, comfort, and security of the fuselage.