before his meeting with Monsieur de Montause on the Babylonian
plain; but his situation was more perilous than then, for he was
passing over hilly country, and the vertical wind-eddies were
infinitely more difficult to contend with. To attempt to alight would
be to court certain destruction; his only safety was to maintain as
high a speed as possible, trusting to weather through. He judged by
the compass that the wind was blowing mostly from the south-east,
almost dead against him. Fearing lest the enormous air-pressure should
break the planes if he strove to fly in the teeth of the wind, he
decided to swing round and run before it for a time, in the hope that
it would drop by and by. As he performed this operation the aeroplane
rocked violently, and he thought every moment that it must be hurled
to the ground; but by making a wide circle he got round safely, and
keeping the engine at full speed he retraced his course, soon seeing
Port Moresby again, far below him to the left. He had no means of
exactly determining the rate at which he was now travelling under the
joint impulse of the wind and his propellers; but from the way in
which the landscape was slipping past him he thought the speed could
hardly be less than two hundred and twenty miles an hour.

It occurred to him now to increase his altitude, with the idea of
rising above the area of the disturbance. But he found that the
mountains on his right hand rose higher than he had supposed. In
proportion as he ascended, they seemed to rise with him. He saw their
snow-clad tops stretching far away into the distance, and became
conscious of a great difference in the temperature. He began to feel
dizzy and short of breath, and presently his eyes were affected, and
he saw everything as in a mist. When Rodier shouted that he was
feeling sick Smith at once checked the ascent.

The aneroid indicated a height of 8000 feet, and it was clear from the
greater steadiness of the machine that it had risen out of the stratum
of air affected by the storm. But Smith's satisfaction at this was
soon dashed by the discovery that there was something wrong with the
engine. It missed sparking, recovered itself for a minute or two, then
missed again. Smith looked anxiously below him. The nearest ground was
about a thousand feet beneath; on his right the mountains still rose
hundreds of feet above him, blocking the way to his true course.
Hoping that the failure in the sparking was only temp