He turned round at a touch on his arm.
"You would like to see the start, perhaps," said the old priest.
"We are a little late to-night. The country mails have only just arrived. But we shall be off directly now. Come this way."
The upper deck, as the two turned inwards, presented an extremely pleasant and rea.s.suring picture. From stem to stern it ran clear, set out, however, with groups of tables and chairs clamped to the floor, at which sat a dozen parties or so, settling themselves down comfortably. There were no funnels, no bridge, no break at all to the delightful vista. The whole was lighted by the same device as were the streets, for round the upper edges of the transparent walls that held out the wind shone a steady, even glow from invisible lights.
In the very centre of the deck, however, was a low railing that protected the head of a staircase, and down this well the two looked.
"Shall I explain?" asked the old priest, smiling. "This is the latest model, you know. It has not been in use for more than a few months."
The other nodded.
"Tell me everything, please."
"Well, look right down there, below the second flight. The first flight leads to the second-cla.s.s deck, and the flight below to the working parts of the ship. Now do you see that man"s head, straight in the middle, in the bright light?--yes, immediately under. Well, that"s the first engineer. He"s in a gla.s.s compartment, you see, and can look down pa.s.sages in every direction. The gas arrangements are all in front of him, and the----"
"Stop, please. What power is it that drives the ship? Is it lighter than air, or what?"
"Well, you see the entire framework of the ship is hollow. Every single thing you see--even the chairs and tables--they"re all made of the metal _aerolite_ (as it"s generally called). It"s almost as thin as paper, and it"s far stronger than any steel.
Now it"s the framework of the ship that takes the place of the old balloon. It"s infinitely safer, too, for it"s divided by automatically closing stops into tens of thousands of compartments, so a leak here and there makes practically no difference. Well, when the ship"s at rest, as it is now, there"s simply air in all these tubes; but when it"s going to start, there is forced into these tubes, from the magazine below, the most volatile gas that has been discovered----"
"What"s it called?"
"I forget the real name. It"s generally called _aeroline_. Well, this is forced in, until the specific gravity of the whole affair, pa.s.sengers and all, is as nearly as possible the same as the specific gravity of the air."
"I see. Good Lord, how simple!"
"And the rest is done with planes and screws, driven by electricity. The tail of the boat is a recent development.
(You"ll see it when we"re once started.) It"s exactly like the tail of a bird, and contracts and expands in every direction.
Then besides that there are two wings, one on each side, and these can be used, if necessary, in case the screws go wrong, as propellers. But usually they are simply for balancing and gliding. You see, barring collisions, there"s hardly the possibility of an accident. If one set of things fails, there"s always something else to take its place. At the very worst, we can but be blown about a bit."
"But it"s exactly like a bird, then."
"Of course, Monsignor," said the priest, with twinkling eyes, "it isn"t likely that we could improve upon Almighty G.o.d"s design. We"re very simple, you know. . . . Look, he"s signalling. We"re going to start. Come to the prow. We shall see better from there."
The upper deck ended in a railing, below which protruded, from the level of the lower deck, the prow proper of the boat. Upon this prow, in a small compartment of which the roof, as well as the walls, was of hardened gla.s.s, stood the steersman amid his wheels. But the wheels were unlike anything that the bewildered man who looked down had ever dreamed of. First, they were not more than six inches in diameter; and next, they were arranged, like notes on a keyboard, with their edges towards him, with the whole set curved round him in a semicircle.
"Those to right and left," explained the priest, "control the planes on either side; those in front, on the left, control the engines and the gas supply; and on the right, the tail of the boat. Watch him, and you"ll see. We"re just starting."
As he spoke three bells sounded from below, followed, after a pause, by a fourth. The steersman straightened himself as the first rang out and glanced round him; and upon the fourth, bent himself suddenly over the key board, like a musician addressing himself to a piano.
For the first instant Monsignor was conscious of a slight swaying motion, which resolved itself presently into a faint sensation of constriction on his temples, but no more. Then this pa.s.sed, and as he glanced away again from the steersman, who was erect once more, his look happened to fall over the edge of the boat. He grasped his friend convulsively.
"Look," he said, "what"s happened?"
"Yes, we"re off," said the priest sedately.
Beneath them, on either side, there now stretched itself an almost illimitable and amazingly beautiful bird"s-eye view of a lighted city, separated from them by what seemed an immeasurable gulf. From the enormous height up to which they had soared the city looked like a complicated flat map, of which the patches were dark and the dividing lines rivers of soft fire. This stretched practically to the horizon on all sides; the light toned down at the edges into a misty luminosity, but as the bewildered watcher stared in front of him, he saw how directly in their course there slid toward them two great patches of dark, divided by a luminous stream in the middle.
"What is it? What is it?" he stammered.
The priest seemed not to notice his agitation; he just pa.s.sed his hand quietly into the trembling man"s elbow.
"Yes," he said, "there are houses all the way to Brighton now, of course, and we go straight down the track. We shall take in pa.s.sengers at Brighton, I think."
There was a step behind them.
"Good evening, Monsignor," said a voice. "It"s a lovely night."
The prelate turned round, covered with confusion, and saw a man in uniform saluting him deferentially.
"Ah! captain," slipped in the priest. "So we"re crossing with you, are we?"
"That"s it, father. The _Michael_ line"s running this week."
"It"s a wonderful thing to me----" began Monsignor, but a sharp pressure on his arm checked him--"how you keep the whole organization going," he ended lamely.
The captain smiled.
"It"s pretty straightforward," he said. "The _Michael_ line runs the first week of every month; the _Gabriel_ the second, and so on."
"Then----"
"Yes," put in Father Jervis. "Whose idea was it to dedicate the lines to the archangels? I forget."
"Ah! that"s ancient history to me, father. . . . Excuse me, Monsignor; I think I hear my bell." he wheeled, saluting again, and was off.
"Do you mean---?" began Monsignor.
"Of course," said Father Jervis, "everything runs on those lines now. You see we"re matter-of-fact, and it"s really rather obvious, when you think of it, to dedicate the volor lines to the angels. We"ve been becoming more and more obvious for the last fifty years. . . . By the way, Monsignor, you must take care not to give yourself away. You"d better not ask many questions except of me."
Monsignor changed the subject.
"When shall we get to Paris?" he asked.
"We shall be a little late, I think, unless they make up time.
We"re due at three. I hope there won"t be any delay at Brighton.
Sometimes on windy nights----"
"I suppose the descending and the starting again takes some time."
The priest laughed.
"We don"t descend at places _en route_," he said. "The tender comes up to us. It"ll probably be in its place by now. We aren"t ten minutes away."
The other compressed his lips and was silent.
Presently, far away to the southward beneath the soft starlit sky, the luminous road down which they travelled seemed to expand once more almost abruptly into another vast spread of lights. But as they approached this did not extend any farther, but lay cut off sharp by a long, curving line of almost complete darkness.