ght below three thousand at this
time o' the year. I hate slathering through fluff."

"So does Van Cutsem. Look at him huntin' for a slant!" says Captain
Hodgson. A fog-light breaks cloud a hundred fathoms below. The Antwerp
Night Mail makes her signal and rises between two racing clouds far to
port, her flanks blood-red in the glare of Sheerness Double Light. The
gale will have us over the North Sea in half an hour, but Captain
Purnall lets her go composedly--nosing to every point of the compass as
she rises.

"Five thousand--six, six thousand eight hundred"--the dip-dial reads ere
we find the easterly drift, heralded by a flurry of snow at the
thousand-fathom level. Captain Purnall rings up the engines and keys
down the governor on the switch before him. There is no sense in urging
machinery when AEolus himself gives you good knots for nothing. We are
away in earnest now--our nose notched home on our chosen star. At this
level the lower clouds are laid out all neatly combed by the dry fingers
of the East. Below that again is the strong westerly blow through which
we rose. Overhead, a film of southerly drifting mist draws a theatrical
gauze across the firmament. The moonlight turns the lower strata to
silver without a stain except where our shadow underruns us. Bristol and
Cardiff Double Lights (those statelily inclined beams over Severnmouth)
are dead ahead of us; for we keep the Southern Winter Route. Coventry
Central, the pivot of the English system, stabs upward once in ten
seconds its spear of diamond light to the north; and a point or two off
our starboard bow The Leek, the great cloud-breaker of Saint David's
Head, swings its unmistakable green beam twenty-five degrees each way.
There must be half a mile of fluff over it in this weather, but it does
not affect The Leek.

"Our planet's overlighted if anything," says Captain Purnall at the
wheel, as Cardiff-Bristol slides under. "I remember the old days of
common white verticals that 'ud show two or three thousand feet up in a
mist, if you knew where to look for 'em. In really fluffy weather they
might as well have been under your hat. One could get lost coming home
then, an' have some fun. Now, it's like driving down Piccadilly."

He points to the pillars of light where the cloud-breakers bore through
the cloud-floor. We see nothing of England's outlines: only a white
pavement pierced in all directions by these manholes of variously
coloured fire--Holy Island