Darkness and Dawn

  CHAPTER XXII

  LIGHTS!

  At realization of the ghastly situation that confronted them,Stern's heart stopped beating for a moment. Despite his courage, asick terror gripped his soul; he felt a sudden weakness, and in hisears the rushing wind seemed shouting mockeries of death.

  As in a dream he felt the girl's hand close in fear upon his arm, heheard her crying something--but what, he knew not.

  Then all at once he fought off the deadly horror. He realized thatnow, if ever, he needed all his strength, resource, intelligence. And,with a violent effort, he flung off his weakness. Again he gripped thewheel. Thought returned. Though the end might be at hand, thank Godfor even a minute's respite!

  Again he looked at the indicator.

  Yes, only too truly it showed the terrible fact! No hallucination,this. Not much more than a pint of the precious fluid now lay in thefuel tank. And though the engine still roared, he knew that in aminute or two it must slacken, stop and die.

  What then?

  Even as the question flashed to him, the engine barked its protest. Itskipped, coughed, stuttered. Too well he knew the symptoms, theimperative cry: "More fuel!"

  But he had none to give. In vain for him to open wide the supplyvalve. Vain to adjust the carburetor. Even as he made a despairing,instinctive motion to perform these useless acts--while Beatrice,deathly pale and shaking with terror, clutched at him--the engine spatforth a last, convulsive bark, and grew silent.

  The whirling screws hummed a lower note, then ceased their song andcame to rest.

  The machine lurched forward, swooped, spiraled, and with a sickeningrush, a flailing tumult of the stays and planes, plunged intonothingness!

  Had Stern and the girl not been securely strapped to their seats, theymust have been precipitated into space by the violent, erratic dashes,drops, swerves and rushes of the uncontrolled Pauillac.

  For a moment or two, instinctively despite the knowledge that it coulddo no good, Stern wrenched at the levers. A thousand confused, wild,terrible impressions surged upon his consciousness.

  Swifter, swifter dropped the plane; and now the wind that seemed torise had grown to be a hurricane! Its roaring in their ears wasdeafening. They had to fight even for breath itself.

  Beatrice was leaning forward now, sheltering her face in the hollow ofher arm. Had she fainted? Stern could not tell. He still was fightingwith the mechanism, striving to bring it into some control. But,without headway, it defied him. And like a wounded hawk, dying even asit struggled, the Pauillac staggered wildly down the unplumbed abyss.

  How long did the first wild drop last? Stern knew not. He realizedonly that, after a certain time, he felt a warm sensation; and,looking, perceived that they were now plunging through vapors thatsped upward--so it seemed--with vertiginous rapidity.

  No sensation now was there of falling. All motion seemed to lie in theuprushing vapors, dense and warm and pale violet in hue. A vast andrhythmic spiraling had possessed the Pauillac. As you have seen afalling leaf turn in air, so the plane circled, boring with terrificspeed down, down, down through the mists, down into the unknown!

  Nothing to be seen but vapors. No solid body, no land, no earth tomark their fall and gauge it. Yet slowly, steadily, darkness wasshrouding them. And Stern, breathing with great difficulty even in theshelter of his arms, could now hardly more than see as a pale blur thewhite face of the girl beside him.

  The vast wings of the machine, swirling, swooping, plunging down,loomed hugely vague in the deepening shadows. Dizzy, sick with themonstrous caroming through space, deafened by the thunderous roaringof the up-draft, Stern was still able to retain enough of hisscientific curiosity to peer upward. The sun! Could he still see it?

  Vanished utterly was now the glorious orb! There, seeming to circleround and round in drunken spirals, he beheld a weird, diffused,angry-looking blotch of light, tinted a hue different from any everseen on earth by men. And involuntarily, at sight of this, heshuddered.

  Already with the prescience of death full upon him, with a numbdespair clutching his soul, he shrank from that ghastly, hideousaspect of what he knew must be his last sight of the sun.

  Around the girl he drew his right arm; she felt his muscles tauten ashe clasped her to him. Useless now, he knew, any further struggleswith the aeroplane. Its speed, its plummetlike drop checked only bythe huge sweep of its parachute wings, Stern knew now it must fallclear to the bottom of the abyss--if bottom there were. And ifnot--what then?

  Stern dared not think. All human concepts had been shattered by thisstupendous catastrophe. The sickly and unnatural hue of the rushingvapors that tore and slatted the planes, confused his senses; and,added to this, a stifling, numbing gas seemed diffused through theinchoate void. He tried to speak, but could not. Against the girl'scheek he pressed his own. Hers was cold!

  In vain he struggled to cry out. Even had his parched tongue been ableto voice a sound, the howling tempest they themselves were creating asthey fell, would have whipped the shout away and drowned it in thegloom.

  In Stern's ears roared a droning as of a billion hornets. He felt avast, tremendous lassitude. Inside his head it seemed as though ahuge, merciless pressure were grinding at his very brain. His breathcame only slowly and with great difficulty.

  "My God!" he panted. "Oh, for a little fuel! Oh, for a chance--achance to fight--for life!"

  But chance there was none, now. Before his eyes there seemed todarken, to dazzle, a strange and moving curtain. Through it, piercingit with a supreme effort of the will, he caught dim sight of the dialof the chronometer. Subconsciously he noted that it marked 11.25.

  How long had they been falling? In vain his wavering intelligencebattered at the problem. Now, as in a delirium, he fancied it had beenonly minutes; then it seemed hours. Like an insane man he laughed--hetried to scream--he raved. And only the stout straps that had heldthem both prevented him from leaping free of the hurtling machine.

  "Crack!"

  A lashing had given way! Part of the left hand plane had broken loose.Drunkenly, whirling head over like an albatross shot in mid-air, thePauillac plunged.

  It righted, swerved, shot far ahead, then once again somersaulted.

  Stern had disjointed, crazy thoughts of air-pressure, condensation andcompression, resistance, abstruse formulae. To him it seemed that somegigantic problem in stress-calculation were being hurled at him, tosolve--it seemed that, blind, deaf, dumb, some sinister and ghoul-likedemon were flailing him until he answered--and that he could notanswer!

  He had a dim realization of straining madly at his straps till theveins started big and swollen in his hammering brows. Thenconsciousness lapsed.

  Lapsed, yet came again--and with it pain. An awful pain in theear-drums, that roared and crackled without cease.

  Breath! He was fighting for breath!

  It was a nightmare--a horrible dream of darkness and a mighty boomingwind--a dream of stifling vapors and an endless void that sucked themdown, down, down, eternally!

  Delusions came, and mocking visions of safety. Both hands flung out asthough to clutch the roaring gale, he fought the intangible.

  Again he lost all knowledge.

  And once again--how long after, how could he know?--he came to somepartial realization of tortured existence.

  In one of the mad downward rushes--rushes which ended in a long spiralslant--his staring, bloodshot eyes that sought to pierce the murk,seemed to behold a glimmer, a dull gleam of light.

  The engineer screamed imprecations, mingled with wild, demoniaclaughter.

  "Another hallucination!" was his thought. "But if it's not--if it'sHell--then welcome, Hell! Welcome even that, for a chance to stop!"

  A sweep of the Pauillac hid the light from view. Even that faintestray vanished. But--what? It came again! Much nearer now, and brighter!And--another gleam! Another still! Three of them--and they werereal!

  With a tremendous effort, Stern fixed his fevered eyes upon thelights.

 
Up, up at a tremendous rate they seemed speeding. Blue and ghastlythrough the dense vapors, spinning in giddy gyrations, as the machinewheeled, catapulted and slid from one long slant to another, theirrelative positions still remained fixed.

  And, with a final flicker of intelligence, Stern knew they were nofigment of his brain.

  "Lights, Beatrice! Lights, lights, real lights!" he sought to scream.

  But even as he fought to shake her from the swoon that wrapped hersenses, his own last fragment of strength deserted him.

  He had one final sense impression of a swift upshooting of the lights,a sudden brightening of those three radiant points.

  Then came a sudden gleam as though of waters, black and still.

  A gleam, blue and uncanny, across the inky surface of some vast,mysterious, hidden sea.

  Up rushed the lights at him; up rushed the sea of jetty black!

  Stern shouted some wild, incoherent thing.

  Crash!

  A shock! A frightful impact, swift, sudden, annihilating!

  Then in a mad and lashing struggle, all knowledge and all feelingvanished utterly. And the blackness of oblivion received him into itsinsensate bosom.