little whitecaps foaming here and there over the broad expanse of blue. Beatrice and Stern felt the joy of life reborn in them at that sight.
“Magnificent!” cried the engineer. “Now for a swing up past Niagara, and we're off!”
The river, they found as the plane swept onward, had dwindled to a brook that they could almost leap across. The rapids now were but a dreary waste of blackened rocks, and the Falls themselves, dry save for a desolate trickle down past Goat Island, presented a spectacle of death--the death of the world as Beatrice and Stern had known it, which depressed them both.
That this tremendous cataract could vanish thus; that the gorge and the great Falls which for uncounted centuries had thundered to the rush and tumult of the mighty waters could now lie mute and dry and lifeless, saddened them both beyond measure.
And they were glad when, with a wide sweep of her wings, the Pauillac veered to westward again along the north shore of Lake Erie and settled into the long run of close on two hundred and fifty miles to Detroit, where Stern counted on making his first stop.
Without mishap, yet without sighting a single indication of the presence of man, they coasted down the shore and ate their dinner on the banks of Lake Saint Clair, near the ruins of Windsor, with those of Detroit on the opposite side. For some reason or other, impossible to solve, the current now ran northward toward Huron, instead of south to Erie. But this phenomenon they could do little more than merely note, for time lacked to give it any serious study.
Mid-afternoon found them getting under way again westbound.
“Chicago next,” said Stern, making some slight but necessary adjustment of the air-feed in the carburetor. “And here's hoping there'll be some natives to greet us!”
“Amen to that!” answered the girl. “If any life has survived at all, it ought to be on the great central plain of the country, say from Indiana out through Nebraska. But do you know, Allan, if it should come right down to meeting any of our own kind of people--savages, of course, I mean, but white--I really believe I'd be awfully afraid of them. Imagine white savages dressed in skins--”
“Like us!” interrupted Stern, laughing.
“And painted with woad, whatever woad is; I remember reading about it in the histories of England; all the early Britons used it. And carrying nice, knobby stone creeks to stave in our heads! It
Stern only smiled, then answered:
“Well, I'll take
Only half an hour out of Detroit it was that they first became aware of some strange disturbance of the horizon, some inexplicable appearance such as neither of them had ever seen, a phenomenon so peculiar that, though both observed it at about the same time, neither Stern could believe his own senses nor Beatrice hers.
For all at once it seemed to them the sky-line was drawing suddenly nearer; it seemed that the horizon was approaching at high speed.
The dark, untrodden forest mass still stretched away, away, until it vanished against the dim blue of the sky; but now, instead of that meeting-line being forty miles off, it seemed no farther than twenty, and minute by minute it indubitably was rushing toward them with a speed equal to their own.
Stern, puzzled and alarmed at this unusual sight, felt an impulse to slow, to swerve, to test the apparition in some way; but second thought convinced him it must be deception of some sort.
“Some peculiar state of the atmosphere,” thought he, “or perhaps we're approaching a high ridge, on the other side of which lie clouds that cut away the farther view. Or else--no, hang it! the world seems to end right there, with no clouds to veil it--nothing, only--what?”
He saw the girl pointing in alarm. She, too, was clearly stirred by the appearance.
What to do? Stern felt indecision for the first time since he had started on this long, adventurous journey. Shut off and descend? Impossible among those forests. Swing about and return? Not to be thought of. Keep on and meet perils perhaps undreamed of? Yes--at all hazards he would keep on.
And with a tightening of the jaw he drove the Pauillac onward, ever onward--toward the empty space that yawned ahead.
“End o' the world?” thought he. “All right, the old machine is good for it, and so are we. Here goes!”
CHAPTER XX. ON THE LIP OF THE CHASM
Very near, now, was the strange apparition. On, on, swift as a falcon, the plane hurtled. Stern glanced at Beatrice. Never had he seen her more beautiful. About her face, rosy and full of life, the luxuriant loose hair was whipping. Her eyes sparkled with this new excitement, and on her full red lips a smile betrayed her keen enjoyment. No trace of fear was there--nothing but confidence and strength and joy in the adventure.
The phenomenon of the world's end--for nothing else describes it adequately--now appeared distinctly as a jagged line, beyond which nothing showed. It differed from the horizon line, inasmuch as it was close at hand. Already the adventurers could peer down upon it at an acute angle.
Plainly could they see the outlines of trees growing along the verge. But beyond them, nothing.
It differed essentially from a canon, because there was no other side at all. Strain his eye as he might, Stern could detect no opposite wall. And now, realizing something of the possibilities of such a chasm, he swung the Pauillac southward. Flying parallel to the edge of this tremendous barrier, he sought to solve the mystery of its true nature.
“If I go higher, perhaps I may be able to get some notion of it,” thought he, and swinging up-wind, he spiraled till the barometer showed he had gained another thousand feet.
But even this additional view profited him nothing. Half a mile to westward the ragged tree-line still showed as before, with vacancy behind it, and as far as Stern could see to north, to south, it stretched away till the dim blue of distance swallowed it. Yet, straight across the gulf, no land appeared. Only the sky itself was visible there, as calm and as unbroken as in the zenith, yet extending far below where the horizon-line should have been--down, in fact, to where the tree-line cut it off from Stern's vision.
The effect was precisely that of coming to the edge of a vast plain, beyond which nothing lay, save space, and peering over.
“The end of the world, indeed!” thought the engineer, despite himself. “But what can it mean? What can have happened to the sphere to have changed it like this? Good Heavens, what a marvel--what a catastrophe!”
Determined at all hazards to know more of this titanic break or “fault,” or whatsoever it might be, he banked again, and now, on a descending slant, veered down toward the lip of the chasm.
“Going out over it?” cried Beatrice.
He nodded.
“It may be miles deep!”
“You can't get killed any deader falling a hundred miles than you can a hundred feet!” he shouted back, above the droning racket of the motor.
And with a fresh grip on the wheel, head well forward, every sense alert and keen to meet whatever conditions might arise, to battle with cross-currents, “air-holes,” or any other vortices swirling up out of those unknown depths, he skimmed the Pauillac fair toward the lip of the monstrous vacancy.
Now as they rushed almost above the verge he could see conclusively they were not dealing here with a canon like the Yosemite or like any other he had ever seen or heard of in the old days.
There was positively no bottom to the terrific thing!
Just a sheer edge and beyond that--nothing.
Nowhere any sign of an opposite bank; nowhere the faintest trace of land. Far, far below, even a few faint clouds showed floating there as if in mid-heaven.
