mparison with the Handley-Page, the Caproni, the
D.H.-4, the Gotha 90-120, the Sikorsky, it spread itself as an eagle
spreads beside a pigeon.

It lay in a kind of metallic cradle, almost like a ship ready for
launching on its ways. Ahead of it, metal plates stretched away like
rails, running toward the lip of the Palisades. Its quadruple floats,
each the size of a tugboat and each capable of being exhausted of air,
constituted a potential lifting-force of enclosed vacuums that
very largely offset the weight of the mechanism. It was still a
heavier-than-air machine, but the balance could be made nearly
perfect. And the six helicopters, whose cylindrical, turbine-like
drums gleamed with metallic glitters--three on each side along the
fuselage--could at will produce an absolutely static condition of lift
or even make the plane hover and soar quite vertically.

There the monster lay, outstretching its enormous sextuple wings, each
wing with an area of 376 by 82.5 feet. The non-inflammable celluloid
surfaces shone white as fresh-cut ivory, clean, smooth, unbreakable.
The plane reminded one of some Brobdingnagian dragon-fly, resting for
flight, shimmering with power as it poised for one swift leap aloft
into the night.

Bohannan, still a bit confused, noted the absence of any exhaust from
the speeding engines. This, too, gave a sense of vast, self-contained
power. He saw stupendous propeller-blades, their varnished surfaces
flicking out high-lights as the incandescents struck them. Motionless
these propellers were; but something in their tense, clean sweep
told of the raging cyclone to which they could whip the air, once the
spinning engines should be clutched in on their shafts.

The captain's eyes wandered over the whole enormous construction,
towering there above him. He saw rows of lighted windows, each cased
in shining metal; a V-pointed pilot-house--the same where the still
figure had dropped over the sill of the open window--a high-raised
rudder of artful curve, vast as the broadside of a barn; railed
galleries running along the underbody of the fuselage, between the
floats and far aft of them.

Everything gleamed and flickered with bright metal, varnish, snowy
celluloid. The body of the machine looked capable of housing twice as
many men as the Legion numbered. But everything, after all, was quite
shrunk by the overpowering sweep of the wings. These dwarfed the
fast-gathering group that stood peering up at them