a; a sea of dark rushing clouds. Rising two thousand feet
above the level of the ocean, this mass of moisture hanging there in the
sky took on the appearance of a second sea. As Vincent looked down upon
it he found it easy to believe that were they to drop slowly down upon
it, they would be seized upon and torn this way, then that by the
violence of the storm that was even now raging beneath them, and that
their plane would be cast at last, a shapeless mass, upon the real sea
which was roaring and raging beneath it.

"How wonderful nature is!" he breathed. "It would be magnificent were it
not so terrible."

He was thinking of the gasoline in their tank and he shuddered. Would it
last until the storm had passed, or would they be obliged to volplane
down into that seething tempest?

He put his lips to the tube. "You better use just enough gas to keep us
afloat," he suggested.

Alfred muttered something like, "Think I'm a fool?" Then for a long
time, with the black sea of clouds rising and falling, billowing up like
the walls of a mammoth tent, then sagging down to rise again, they
circled and circled. They were not circling now in search of adventure,
to find some island which might bring them great wealth, but to preserve
life. How long that circling could last, neither could tell.

* * * * *

When Curlie Carson left the wireless cabin of the _Kittlewake_, he
grasped a rail which ran along the cabin, just in time to prevent
himself from being washed overboard by a giant wave. As it was, the
water lifted his feet from the deck and, having lifted him as the wind
lifts a flag, it waved him up and down three times, at last to send him
crashing, knees down, on the deck. The wind was half knocked out of him,
but he was still game. He did not attempt to regain the wireless cabin
but fought his way along the side of that cabin toward his own stateroom
door.

Now a vivid flash of light revealed the water-washed deck. A coil of
rope, all uncoiled by the waves, was wriggling like a serpent in the
black sea.

"No use to try to save it," he mumbled. "No good here, anyhow."

A yellow light, hanging above his stateroom door, dancing dizzily,
appeared at one moment to take a plunge into the sea and at the next to
dash away into the ink-black sky.

Curlie was drenched to the skin. He was benumbed with the cold and
shocked into half insensibility at the tremendous proportions of the
storm. He wo