The car turned and approached the great tower again. We swept round it
within a hundred yards, and could see the amazement in the faces that
watched us. But if they were astonished they were not terror-stricken.
Within ten minutes twenty air ships were swiftly approaching us. Edmund
allowed them to come within a few yards, and then darted away, rushed
round the whole city like a flying cloud, and finally rose straight up
with dizzying velocity, which made the vast metropolis shrink to a
colored patch, as if we had been viewing it through the wrong end of a
telescope.
"I'll go right up through the cloud dome now," he said. "Nothing could
more impress them with a sense of our power than that; and when we come
back again they will know that we have no fear, and the very act will be
a proof of origin from the sky."
When we were in the midst of the mighty curtain of vapor, I was
interested in noticing the peculiar quality of the light that surrounded
us. We seemed to be immersed in a rose-pink mist.
"I do not understand," I said to Edmund, "how this dome is maintained at
so great an elevation, and in apparent independence of the rain clouds
which sometimes form beneath.
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