THE YELLOW DOVE
She counted again, guessing at the time she had lost, and then, making a wide spiral out to sea and rising to three thousand feet, she drove the Yellow Dove inland. Searchlights were turned on her and shots fired, but she went higher, trying to make out if she could the lines of the opposing armies. Red and yellow lights were displayed below to her left, and far to her right were tiny clusters of lights, but there seemed to be no order in their arrangement—no lines that she could distinguish even at this height. Her keen eyes, now inured to the darkness, made out a monoplane against the starlight ahead of her—but she swerved to the right, the greater power of the Yellow Dove enabling her to rise and elude it. She flew for what seemed ten or fifteen minutes, going steadily to the south and west, when she drove for a spot where there were no lights and then shut off the throttle and dove.
She knew that this was perhaps the greatest moment of her great adventure. A landing place in the dark in a country she did not know, where a church steeple, a telegraph wire, the limb of a tree, would bring her and her precious freight to disaster. With the sudden shutting off of the power, a silence that bewildered her, a silence broken only by the whirr of the wind against the planes. Her ears ached from the change of pressure in her swift descent. She eased her wheel back gently, trying to make out objects below. Dark patches—woods—to be avoided, the roof of a house—another—lights here and there, small, obscure, which she had not seen. She avoided them all, planing down in a spiral toward what seemed to be unobstructed space.
She breathed a prayer as the earth came up to meet her. Death? Whatever came—Cyril, too. . . .
318
