ught that my little
trip in the _Ithuriel_ took me to something like the limits of everyday
experience; but this beats it. Whatever you do on the land or in the
water you seem to have something under you--something you can depend on,
as it were--but here, you don't seem to be anywhere. A friend of mine
told me that, after he had taken a balloon trip above the clouds and
across the Channel, but he was only travelling forty miles an hour. He
had somewhat a trouble to describe that, but this, of course, gets
rather beyond the capabilities of the English language."

"Or even the American," added Mr Hingeston, quietly.

"Why, yes," said Mr Parmenter, rolling a cigarette, "I believe we
invented the saying about greased lightning, and here we are something
like riding on a streak of it."

"Near enough!" laughed Lennard. "We may as well leave it at that, as you
say. Still, it is very, very wonderful."

And so it was. As they sped south the mists that hung about the northern
moors fell behind, and broken clouds took their place. Through the gaps
between these he could see a blur of green and grey and purple. A few
blotches of black showed that they were passing over the Lancashire and
Midland manufacturing towns; then the clouds became scarcer and an
enormous landscape spread out beneath them, intersected by white roads
and black lines of railways, and dotted by big patches of woods, long
lines of hedgerows and clumps of trees on hilltops. Here and there the
white wall of a chalk quarry flashed into view and vanished; and on
either side towns and villages came into sight ahead and vanished astern
almost before he could focus his field-glasses upon them.

At about twenty minutes after the hour at which they had left Whernside,
Mr Hingeston turned to Mr Parmenter and said, pointing downward with the
left hand:

"There's London, and the clouds are going. What are we to do? We can't
drop down there without being seen, and if we are that will give half
the show away. You see, if Castellan once gets on to the idea that
we've got airships and are taking them into London, he'll have a dozen
of those _Flying Fishes_ worrying about us before we know what we're
doing. If we only had one of those good old London fogs under us we
could do it."

"Then what's the matter with dropping under the smoke and using that for
a fog," said Mr Parmenter, rather shortly. "The enemy is still a dozen
miles to southward there; they won't see us, and