The Irish standard., 1911-07-29
CHAPTER I.
The Man With Wings,

CHAPTER Z.
The Man With Wings.
For many hours-Cayley was too
much OF god today to bother with
tne exact number Of them-he had
been flying slowly northward down
mild southerly breeze. Hundreds of
teet below him was the dazzling, ter
slble expanse Of the polar ice pack
(which shrouds the northern limits of
the Arctic ocean In its impenetrable
veil Of mystery.
A compass. . sextant, bottle Of
milk and a revolver comprised, with
! the clothes he wore, and with the
shimmering silken wings of his areo-
plane, his whole equipment. His near
est base OF supplies, if you could call
1t that, was 20-pound tin Of pemmi-
can, hidden under a stone on the
north east extremity of Herald island,
300 miles away. The United States
rescue station at Point Barrow, the
extreme northerly point of Alaska,
the place which he had called home
for the past three months, was pos
sibly, half as far again away, some.
where off to the southeast.
But for these past weeks of I'm
broken arctic sunshine, he had fairly
lived awning. The earth had no OBJ
structions and the air no perils. To
day, with his great broad fan.tail
drawn up arc-wise beneath him, his
planes pitched slightly forward at the
precise and perilous angle that only
Just did not send him plunging, head
first, down upon the sullen masses Of
ice below, he lay there, prone, upon
the sheep-skin sleeping bag which
padded the framework supporting his
two wings, as secure as the great full
mar petrol which drew curiously near,
and then. with a wheel and a plunge,
lied. away, sQuawhng.
For all practical purposes Cayley
had learned to fly. The great fan
driven air ship, 100 feet from tip to
tip, which had long lain idle on his
ranch at sandoval. would probably
never leave its house again It had
done yeornan service. Without its
powerful propellers, for the last re-
source, Cayley would never have been
able to try the experiments and get
the practise which had given him the
air for his natural element. He had
outgrown 1t. He had no more need
OF motors or whirling fans. The force
of gravity, the force Of the breeze and
: the perfectly co-ordinated muscles Of
his own body gave him all the power
he needed now.
Perhaps the succeeding generations
of humankind may develop an eye
which can see ahead when the body
Is lying prone, as q bird lies in its
flight. Cayley had remedied this de-
f1ciency with q little silver mirror,
slightly concave, screwed fast to the
crossbraoe which supported his shout
ders. Instead Of bending back his
head, or trying to see out through his
eyebrows, he simply cast backward
glance into this mirror whenever he
wanted to look on ahead. It had been
little perplexing at first, but he
could see better in 1t now than with
his unaided eyes.
And now, minute or two, perhaps,
after that fulmar had gone squawking
away, he glanced down into his mir
row, and his olympian calm was
shaken with the shock Of surprise.
For what he saw, clearly reflected in
his little reducing glass, was land.
There was a mountain, and long
dark line that must be q clifflike
coast.
And It was land that never had
been marked on any chart. In abso-
lutte degrees Of latitude he was not,
from the arctic explorers view, very
far north. Over on the other side Of
the world they run excursion steam
ers every summer nearer to the pole
than he was at this moment. Spitz-
bergen, which has had permanent
population of $4,000 souls, lies 800
miles farther north than this un-
charted coast which Philip Cayley saw
before him.
But the great ice cap which covers
the top of the world is irregular in
shape, and just here, northward from
, Alaska, it juts it's impenetrable bar
rier far down into the Arctic sea.
S1Ok0C8s SO11lAoVA 0AU tA0 4AA-AoIOO LIZ
Long-they all had tried to penetrate
this barrier, and had been turned
back.
Cayley wheeled sharply up into the
wind, and scared aloft to a height of,
perhaps, a quarter Of mile. Then,
with a long, flashing, shimmering
sweep, he descended, in the arc of a
great circle, and hung, poised, over
the land itself and behind the jutting
shoulder of the mountain.
The land was narrow-necked Pc
ninsula. Mountain and cliff prevented
him from seeing the immediate coast
on the other side Of It.; but out little
way to sea he was amazed to discover
open water, and the smoke-like vapor
that he saw rising over the cliffhead
made 1t evident that the opening ex'