It was Georges, dancing on the grass
beside me, who first proclaimed his identity.
"It is he, the crazy pupil!" he cried. "I have seen through my glass
the little silk flag he attached to the nacelle. Now you are going to
marvel that I still live!"
In a few moments the sound of his motor fell faintly on our ears as a
whisper from the clouds. Then--_chut_!--it stopped, and in a single
leap he dived a sheer thousand feet.
That in itself was amazing temerity for one who had flown just long
enough to justify him in piloting an aero bus in a dead calm. But
I was little prepared for what followed. Instead of continuing his
flight horizontally at the end of that headlong dive, this tyro pulled
up his elevator, sweeping through a sharp curve into an upward leap
with all the dizzy impetus gained in his descent.
The crowd gasped. At my side Georges danced with anxiety upon the
turf.
"You are right," I said. "He is certainly crazy, this young Monsieur
Power."
"He calls it the _montagnes russes_, this trick," said Georges. "I
have told him that everybody who ever did it is long dead, with the
single exception of yourself, but that to him is entirely equal. See,
he has dived again only just in time!"
And, in truth, another moment of upward flight would infallibly have
caused him to lose headway, and fall backward, to flatten himself upon
the ground. But he had with superb coolness entered upon a second dive
of the most impressive, continuing his species of switchback descent
until within a few hundred feet of the hangars.
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