When the barometer marked eight hundred feet above the sea-level, the _Ariel_ pa.s.sed through a stratum of light clouds, and on the upper side of this the sun was still shining, shooting his almost level rays across it as though over some illimitable sea of white fleecy billows, whose crests were tipped with rosy, golden light.
Above the surface of this fairy sea rose north-eastward the black ma.s.s of Ben More on the Island of Mull, and to the southward, the lesser peaks of Jura and Islay.
While he was still wrapped in admiration of the strange beauty of this, to him, marvellous scene, the _Ariel_ had risen to a thousand feet, still almost in a vertical line from the island. Arnold now pressed another b.u.t.ton, and the stern propeller began to revolve swiftly and noiselessly, and Colston saw the waves of the cloud-sea begin to slip behind, although so smooth was the working of the machinery, and the motion of the air-ship, that, but for this, he could hardly have guessed that he was in motion.
Arnold now turned a few spokes of the wheel, and headed the _Ariel_ due east by the compa.s.s. Then he touched a third b.u.t.ton. The side propellers began to turn swiftly on their axes, and, at the same time the speed of the fan-wheels slackened, and gradually stopped.
Colston now began to feel the air rushing by him in a stream so rapid and strong, that he had to take hold of the side of the wheel-house doorway to steady himself.
"I think you had better come inside and shut the door," said Arnold.
"We are getting up speed now, and in a few minutes you won"t be able to hold yourself there. You"ll be able to see just as well inside."
Colston did as he was bidden, and as soon as he was safely inside Arnold pulled a lever beside the wheel, and slightly inclined the planes from forward aft. At the same time the fan-wheels began to slide down the masts until they rested upon the deck.
"Now, you shall see her fly," said Arnold, taking a speaking-tube from the wall and whistling thrice into it.
Colston felt a slight tremor in the deck beneath his feet, and then a lifting movement. He staggered a little, and said to Arnold--
"What"s that? Are we going higher still?"
"Yes," replied the engineer. "She is feeling the air-planes now under the increased speed. I am going up to fifteen hundred feet, so that we shall only have the highest peaks to steer clear of in crossing Scotland. Now, use your eyes, and you will see something worth looking at."
The upper part of the wheel-house was constructed almost entirely of gla.s.s, and so Colston could see just as well as if he had been on deck outside. He did use his eyes. In fact, for some time to come, all his other senses seemed to be merged in that of sight, for the scene was one of such rare and marvellous beauty, and the sensations that it called up were of so completely novel a nature, that, for the time being, he felt as though he had been suddenly transported into fairyland.
The cloud-sea now lay about seven hundred feet beneath them. The sun had sunk quite below the horizon, even at that elevation; but his absence was more than made up for by the nearly full moon, which had risen to the southward, as though to greet the conqueror of the air, and was spreading a flood of silvery radiance over the snowy plain beneath, through the great gaps in which they could see the darker sheen of the moving sea-waves.
Their course lay almost exactly along the fifty-sixth parallel of lat.i.tude, and took them across Argyle, Dumbarton, and Stirlingshire to the head of the Firth of Forth. As they approached the mainland, Colston saw one or two peaks rise up out of the clouds, and soon they were sweeping along in the midst of a score or so of these. To the left Ben Lomond towered into the clear sky above his attendant peaks, and to the right the lower summits of the Campsie Fells soon rose a few miles ahead.
The rapidity with which these mountain-tops rose up on either side, and were left behind, proved to Colston that the _Ariel_ must be travelling at a tremendous speed, and yet, but for a very slight quivering of the deck, there was no motion perceptible, so smoothly did the air-ship glide through the elastic medium in which she floated.
So engrossed was he with the unearthly beauty of the new world into which he had risen, that for nearly two hours he stood without speaking a word. Arnold, wrapped in his own thoughts, maintained a like silence, and so they sped on amidst a stillness that was only broken by the soft whirring of the propellers, and the singing of the wind past the masts and stays.
At length a faint sound like the dashing of breakers on a rocky coast roused Colston from his reverie, and he turned to Arnold and said--
"What is that? Not the sea, surely!"
"Yes, those are the waves of the Firth of Forth breaking on the sh.o.r.es of Fife."
"What! Do you mean to tell me that we have crossed Scotland already?
Why, we have not been an hour on the way yet!"
"Oh yes, we have," replied the engineer. "We have been nearly two.
You have been so busy looking about you that you have not noticed how the time has pa.s.sed. We have travelled a little over two hundred and forty miles. We are over the German Ocean now, and as there will be no more hills until we reach the Ourals we can go down a little."
As he spoke he moved the lever beside him about an inch, and instantly the clouds seemed to rise up toward them as the _Ariel_ swept downwards in her flight. A hundred feet above them Arnold touched the lever again, and the air-ship at once resumed her horizontal course.
Then he put her head a little more to the northward, and called down the speaking tube for Andrew Smith to come and relieve him. A minute later Smith"s head appeared at the top of the companion-ladder which led from the saloon to the wheel-house, and Arnold gave him the wheel and the course, saying at the same time to Colston--
"Now, come down and have something to eat, and then we will have a smoke and a chat and go to bed. There is nothing more to be seen until the morning, and then I will show you Petersburg as it looks from the clouds."
"If you told me you would show me the Ourals themselves, I should believe you after what I have seen," replied Colston, as together they descended the companion-way from the wheel-house to the saloon.
"Ah, I"m afraid that would be too much even for the _Ariel_ to accomplish in the time," said Arnold. "Still, I think I can guarantee that you shall cross Europe in such time as no man ever crossed it before."
CHAPTER XI.
FIRST BLOOD.
After supper the two friends ascended to the deck saloon for a smoke, and to continue their discussion of the tremendous events in which they were so soon to be taking part. They found the _Ariel_ flying through a cloudless sky over the German Ocean, whose white-crested billows, silvered by the moonlight, were travelling towards the north-east under the influence of the south-west breeze from which the engineer had promised himself a.s.sistance when they started.
"We seem to be going at a most frightful speed," said Colston, looking down at the water. "There"s a strong south-west breeze blowing, and yet those white horses seem to be travelling quite the other way."
"Yes," replied Arnold, looking down. "This wind will be travelling about twenty miles an hour, and that means that we are making nearly a hundred and fifty. The German Ocean here is five hundred miles across, and we shall cross it at this rate in about three hours and a half, and if the wind holds over the land we shall sight Petersburg soon after sunrise.
"The sun will rise to-morrow morning a few minutes after five by Greenwich time, which is about two hours behind Petersburg time.
Altogether we shall make, I expect, from two to two and a half hours"
gain on time."
The two men talked until a few minutes after ten, and then went to bed. Colston, who had been travelling all the previous night, began to feel drowsy in spite of the excitement of the novel voyage, and almost as soon as he lay down in his berth dropped off into a sound, dreamless sleep, and knew nothing more until Arnold knocked at his door and said--
"If you want to see the sun rise, you had better get up. Coffee will be ready in a quarter of an hour."
Colston pulled back the slide which covered the large oblong pane of toughened gla.s.s which was let into the side of his cabin and looked out. There was just light enough in the grey dawn to enable him to see that the _Ariel_ was pa.s.sing over a sea dotted in the distance with an immense number of islands.
"The Baltic," he said to himself as he jumped out of bed. "This is travelling with a vengeance! Why, we must have travelled a good deal over a thousand miles during the night. I suppose those islands will be off the coast of Finland. If so, we are not far from Petersburg, as the _Ariel_ seems to count distance."
The most magnificent spectacle that Colston had ever seen in his life, or, for the matter of that, ever dreamed of, was the one that he saw from the conning-tower of the _Ariel_ while the sun was rising over the vast plain of mingled land and water which stretched away to the eastward until it melted away into the haze of early morning.
The sky was perfectly clear and cloudless, save for a few light clouds that hung about the eastern horizon, and were blazing gold and red in the light of the newly-risen sun. The air-ship was flying at an elevation of about two thousand feet, which appeared to be her normal height for ordinary travelling. There was land upon both sides of them, but in front opened a wide bay, the northern sh.o.r.es of which were still fringed with ice and snow.
"That is the Gulf of Finland," said Arnold. "The winter must have been very late this year, and that probably means that we shall find the eastern side of the Ourals still snow-bound."
"So much the better," replied Colston. "They will have a much better chance of escape if there is good travelling for a sleigh."
"Yes," replied Arnold, his brows contracting as he spoke. "Do you know, if it were not for the Master"s explicit orders, I should be inclined to smash up the station at Ekaterinburg a few hours beforehand, and then demand the release of the whole convict train, under penalty of laying the town in ruins."
Colston shook his head, saying--
"No, no, my friend, we must have a little more diplomacy than that.
Your thirst for the life of the enemy will, no doubt, be fully gratified later on. Besides, you must remember that you would probably blow some hundreds of perfectly innocent people to pieces, and very possibly a good many friends of the Cause among them."
"True," replied Arnold; "I didn"t think of that; but I"ll tell you what we can do, if you like, without transgressing our instructions or hurting any one except the soldiers of the Tsar, who, of course, are paid to slaughter and be slaughtered, and so don"t count."
"What is that?" asked Colston.