t
badly--one got a broken leg and one was internally injured--by flying
rods and wires, and Bert was pinned for a time under the side. When
at last he got clear and could take a view of the situation, the great
black eagle that had started so splendidly from Franconia six
evenings ago, sprawled deflated over the cabins of the airship and the
frost-bitten rocks of this desolate place and looked a most unfortunate
bird--as though some one had caught it and wrung its neck and cast
it aside. Several of the crew of the airship were standing about in
silence, contemplating the wreckage and the empty wilderness into which
they had fallen. Others were busy under the imromptu tent made by
the empty gas-chambers. The Prince had gone a little way off and was
scrutinising the distant heights through his field-glass. They had
the appearance of old sea cliffs; here and there were small clumps of
conifers, and in two places tall cascades. The nearer ground was strewn
with glaciated boulders and supported nothing but a stunted Alpine
vegetation of compact clustering stems and stalkless flowers. No river
was visible, but the air was full of the rush and babble of a torrent
close at hand. A bleak and biting wind was blowing. Ever and again a
snowflake drifted past. The springless frozen earth under Bert's feet
felt strangely dead and heavy after the buoyant airship.

6

So it came about that that great and powerful Prince Karl Albert was
for a time thrust out of the stupendous conflict he chiefly had been
instrumental in provoking. The chances of battle and the weather
conspired to maroon him in Labrador, and there he raged for six long
days, while war and wonder swept the world. Nation rose against
nation and air-fleet grappled air-fleet, cities blazed and men died in
multitudes; but in Labrador one might have dreamt that, except for a
little noise of hammering, the world was at peace.

There the encampment lay; from a distance the cabins, covered over with
the silk of the balloon part, looked like a gipsy's tent on a rather
exceptional scale, and all the available hands were busy in building
out of the steel of the framework a mast from which the Vaterland's
electricians might hang the long conductors of the apparatus for
wireless telegraphy that was to link the Prince to the world again.
There were times when it seemed they would never rig that mast. From
the outset the party suffered hardship. They were not too abundantly
provisi