art of the eagle.

From the magazine amidships a covered canvas gallery with aluminium
treads on its floor and a hand-rope, ran back underneath the gas-chamber
to the engine-room at the tail; but along this Bert did not go, and from
first to last he never saw the engines. But he went up a ladder against
a gale of ventilation--a ladder that was encased in a kind of gas-tight
fire escape--and ran right athwart the great forward air-chamber to the
little look-out gallery with a telephone, that gallery that bore the
light pom-pom of German steel and its locker of shells. This gallery
was all of aluminium magnesium alloy, the tight front of the air-ship
swelled cliff-like above and below, and the black eagle sprawled
overwhelmingly gigantic, its extremities all hidden by the bulge of
the gas-bag. And far down, under the soaring eagles, was England, four
thousand feet below perhaps, and looking very small and defenceless
indeed in the morning sunlight.

The realisation that there was England gave Bert sudden and unexpected
qualms of patriotic compunction. He was struck by a quite novel idea.
After all, he might have torn up those plans and thrown them away. These
people could not have done so very much to him. And even if they did,
ought not an Englishman to die for his country? It was an idea that
had hitherto been rather smothered up by the cares of a competitive
civilisation. He became violently depressed. He ought, he perceived, to
have seen it in that light before. Why hadn't he seen it in that light
before?

Indeed, wasn't he a sort of traitor?... He wondered how the aerial fleet
must look from down there. Tremendous, no doubt, and dwarfing all the
buildings.

He was passing between Manchester and Liverpool, Kurt told him; a
gleaming band across the prospect was the Ship Canal, and a weltering
ditch of shipping far away ahead, the Mersey estuary. Bert was a
Southerner; he had never been north of the Midland counties, and the
multitude of factories and chimneys--the latter for the most part
obsolete and smokeless now, superseded by huge electric generating
stations that consumed their own reek--old railway viaducts, mono-rail
net-works and goods yards, and the vast areas of dingy homes and narrow
streets, spreading aimlessly, struck him as though Camberwell and
Rotherhithe had run to seed. Here and there, as if caught in a net, were
fields and agricultural fragments. It was a sprawl of undistinguished
population. Th