This, too, gave a sense of vast, self-contained
power. He saw stupendous propeller-blades, their varnished surfaces
flicking out high-lights as the incandescents struck them. Motionless
these propellers were; but something in their tense, clean sweep
told of the raging cyclone to which they could whip the air, once the
spinning engines should be clutched in on their shafts.
The captain's eyes wandered over the whole enormous construction,
towering there above him. He saw rows of lighted windows, each cased
in shining metal; a V-pointed pilot-house--the same where the still
figure had dropped over the sill of the open window--a high-raised
rudder of artful curve, vast as the broadside of a barn; railed
galleries running along the underbody of the fuselage, between the
floats and far aft of them.
Everything gleamed and flickered with bright metal, varnish, snowy
celluloid. The body of the machine looked capable of housing twice as
many men as the Legion numbered. But everything, after all, was quite
shrunk by the overpowering sweep of the wings. These dwarfed the
fast-gathering group that stood peering up at them, like pygmies under
the pinions of the fabled roc in Sinbad the Sailor's story.
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