ly keen upon this
wonderful new weapon Germany had assumed so suddenly and dramatically.
He showed things to Bert with a boyish eagerness and appreciation. It
was as if he showed them over again to himself, like a child showing a
new toy. "Let's go all over the ship," he said with zest. He pointed out
particularly the lightness of everything, the use of exhausted aluminium
tubing, of springy cushions inflated with compressed hydrogen; the
partitions were hydrogen bags covered with light imitation leather, the
very crockery was a light biscuit glazed in a vacuum, and weighed next
to nothing. Where strength was needed there was the new Charlottenburg
alloy, German steel as it was called, the toughest and most resistant
metal in the world.

There was no lack of space. Space did not matter, so long as load did
not grow. The habitable part of the ship was two hundred and fifty
feet long, and the rooms in two tiers; above these one could go up into
remarkable little white-metal turrets with big windows and airtight
double doors that enabled one to inspect the vast cavity of the
gas-chambers. This inside view impressed Bert very much. He had never
realised before that an airship was not one simple continuous gas-bag
containing nothing but gas. Now he saw far above him the backbone of the
apparatus and its big ribs, "like the neural and haemal canals," said
Kurt, who had dabbled in biology.

"Rather!" said Bert appreciatively, though he had not the ghost of an
idea what these phrases meant.

Little electric lights could be switched on up there if anything went
wrong in the night. There were even ladders across the space. "But you
can't go into the gas," protested Bert. "You can't breve it."

The lieutenant opened a cupboard door and displayed a diver's suit, only
that it was made of oiled silk, and both its compressed-air knapsack and
its helmet were of an alloy of aluminium and some light metal. "We can
go all over the inside netting and stick up bullet holes or leaks," he
explained. "There's netting inside and out. The whole outer-case is rope
ladder, so to speak."

Aft of the habitable part of the airship was the magazine of explosives,
coming near the middle of its length. They were all bombs of various
types mostly in glass--none of the German airships carried any guns at
all except one small pom-pom (to use the old English nickname dating
from the Boer war), which was forward in the gallery upon the shield at
the he