excitement and stern duties to perform, joined with powerful bodies,
made sleeplessness and labor trivialities.

For an hour the two had been standing there, wrapped in their long
military overcoats, while _Nissr_ had swooped on her appointed ways,
with hurtling trajectory that had cleft the dark. Somewhat warmed by
piped exhaust-gases though the glass-enclosed gallery had been, still
the cold had been marked; for without, in the stupendous gulf of
emptiness that had been rushing away beneath and all about them, no
doubt the thermometer would have sunk below zero.

_Nissr's_ altitude was now very great, ranging between 17,500 and
21,000 feet, so as to take advantage of the steady eastward setting
wind in the higher air-lanes. A hard, frozen moonlight, from the
steely disk sinking down the western sky, had slashed ink-black
shadows of struts and stanchions across the gallery, and had flung
_Nissr's_ larger shadow down the hungering abysses of the sky that
yawned beneath.

That shadow had danced and quivered at fantastic speed across dazzling
moonlit fields of cloud, ever keeping pace with the Sky Eagle, now
leaping across immense and silent drifts of white, now plunging,
vanishing into black abysses that showed the ocean spinning backward,
ever backward toward the west.

With the coming of dawn, the shadow had faded, and the watchers' eyes
had been turned ahead for some first sight of the out-riders of
the attacking fleets. Bohannan, a little nervous in spite of his
well-seasoned fighting-blood, had smoked a couple of cigars in the
sheltered gallery, pacing up and down with coat-collar about his ears