At last we began to
claw up on a cant, bow-rudder and port-propeller together; only
the nicest balancing of tanks saved us from spinning like the
rifle-bullet of the old days.
"We've got to hitch to windward of that Mark Boat somehow,"
George cried.
"There's no windward," I protested feebly, where I swung shackled
to a stanchion. "How can there be?"
He laughed--as we pitched into a thousand foot blow-out--that red
man laughed beneath his inflated hood!
"Look!" he said. "We must clear those refugees with a high lift."
The Mark Boat was below and a little to the sou'west of us,
fluctuating in the centre of her distraught galaxy. The air was
thick with moving lights at every level. I take it most of them
were trying to lie head to wind, but, not being hydras, they
failed. An under-tanked Moghrabi boat had risen to the limit of
her lift, and, finding no improvement, had dropped a couple of
thousand. There she met a superb wulli-wa, and was blown up
spinning like a dead leaf. Instead of shutting off she went
astern and, naturally, rebounded as from a wall almost into the
Mark Boat, whose language (our G.
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