You never dream dreams, do you, Dad?" "Lucky for you I don't, Pat. One wants some praetical brains in a family of hopeless dreamers like you and your mother." "All the same, you wouldn't like us if we didn't dream, Dad: think of Mum's becoming practical-Heavens!" She poured the boiling water into the teapot and stirred it, while Manning passed over the milk and sugar-a slim slip of a girl in a biscuitcoloured tussore frook, with heavy coils of auburn hair gleaming under the shady brim of the white panama splashed with the vivid green of a silk veil twisted round it. Such a fresh dainty-looking girl, with nice, clear, honest, hazel eyes and a rather adorable mouth, thought Manning, as he watched her pouring out the tea, sitting up in the shade of the old stone archway which looked out through the thickness of the walls on to the sunkissed panorama of dome and minaret and yellow soil. A charming pioture, with the light falling on face and straight well-poised neck, a shaft of sunlight from a crevice just oatehing the heavy jade and gold earring. She passed over a eup to Manning and one to Colonel Smythe, and helped herself to a piece of cake. "Why are you such an unbelieving Jew, Daddy? Why shouldn't men be beginning to fly, as Mr Manning says they are?" "Because, my dear, it's theoretically and practically impossible. Man's not construoted for it: he's meant to move about on the earth.” He "What about the sea? manages to move about on and under that all right, Dad." "That's different: he's not acting against gravity there, whereas to fly, except in some form of balloon, he's got to counteract gravity, and that's the secret he can't find." "How does the bird do it, sir, anyway? We know something about it. He's got to push himself through the air, and the reaction of the air on the wings holds him up. If we can make wings and push them through the air, we ought to get the same result.' "Too much weight to carry in the first place. The bird weighs practically nothing at all, and is specially built for flight-for movement in its own element, the air." "We could build our flyingmachines on the same lines.' "And then they'll break up and drop you with a bump." "All right, sir-you wait and see. But I'll bet you anything you like that we shall be flying within the next ten years." Manning sat up and passed his cigarette-case over. "Cigarette, Miss Smythe?" He lit it for her, and then lighting his own, asked "Who's for climbing the gate?" "Not me, thanks, Manning," said Colonel Smythe; "I've climbed enough broken stairs to-day." "Will you come, Miss Smythe?" asked the subaltern, turning to the girl. "Yes, love to," she said, "and Dad can pack up the tea things." She stood up and brushed the erumbs and dust from her frock. "I utterly refuse to pack up any tea things," replied the Colonel, extending himself luxuriously. "I shall lie here in peace and comfort with a cheroot while you two young idiots ge and climb impossible stairs to get exactly the same view as I get here.' "It's much better higher up, sir." "Well, I'll wait till your flying-machine is going, thanks.” "Be a good girl, Pat, and don't break your neck if you can help it," he added as she stepped out into the sunlight on to the broken old stone stairs leading to the upper battlements, where the rosered gate-towers of carved stone stabbed the vivid blue of the sky. Manning followed the slim figure that stepped so steadily on the very edge of nothing, until they reached the top of the high gate-towers, where two little stone "ohattri" pavilions of carved red granite, still gay with inlay of blue and green tiling, lent an air of dainty finish to the massive strength of the gates rising in double tier well over eighty feet of sheer smooth-cut ashlar, topped with the warmer red of old Moghul brick. The girl climbed into one of them, and resting one shapely arm on the red stone where the gold bracelet glinted vividly, pointed out over the wide landscape-tomb and tower and ruined palace. "Dreams of dead kings, Mr Manning. Isn't it fascinating? I wonder what the man who built this fort thought when he stood here and looked out. Do you think he pietured this lying ruined, and you and me standing here, 'strangers within the gates'?" "He must have had some dim foresight, since he had imagination enough to design this place. But I suppose he said to himself, 'It'll last my time, and his, and theirs, and the rest is with Allah."" "Seven cities . . murmured the girl as her eyes swept over the plain . . . "and now ... "Tumbledown tombs and crumbling arches," said Manning, "but, which is eternal, roses. I picked that one at Humayon's Gardens." He held out a great, heavy-scented, yellow rose. The girl took it and held it to her nostrils. "How lovely! Why do they always have such topping flowers in these old gardens ?" "I sometimes think that never blows the rose so red As where some buried Cæsar bled,'" quoted Manning. "Rose-petal perfume of past grandeur. No, it's for you," he said, as she offered it him back. "Oh, thanks awfully." She pinned it into her dress with an enamel brooch. She pointed out in front. "Look at that vulture coming down wind." The great bird swept past them noiselessly, and turning into the wind, hovered over the battlements awhile and then swept back again. "That's real flight, Miss Smythe, and you and I will do it yet: do it soon now, too, I think. We shall fly over this very place with its atmosphere of dreams and lazy sunkissed hours." "You do really believe it, don't you, Mr Manning? It's not only to make Dad argue?" "Of course I do. The Wrights have shown that it's possible, and all we've got to do is to make it really practicable." "And then what is there left? We shall be like Alexander, with no more worlds to conquer." Man's "Not in reality. found out about one-millionth of what there is to be found out, and the discovery of another millionth won't finish everything. But it's going to revolutionise war when it does come." The girl looked at him. "I wish it could revolutionise it out of existence," she said. "I'm afraid it won't do that yet," he replied gravely. "But we're getting on pretty fast. Think! Three hundred years ago Humayon stood on this very gate watching his troops marching out, horse and foot and elephants, all in clinking olattering mail. You and I, perhaps, will stand on this gate and watch the troops of the future passing by, not horse and foot and elephants, but horse and foot and birds— chiefly birds, great birds sweeping past, with the glint of brass and steel Over the gleaming fabrio of their wings, and the dull blue of machineguns and pompoms. When that comes, the horse and foot will begin to go and wars be won in the air." The voice was full of enthusiasm, and the speaker's face held the far-off rapt look of one who gazes from the high hills over & new strange country, yet one which seems half familiar from being so often visualised in the lonely halts of the long upclimb. The girl looked at him in wonderment. What funny things men were. Why did they sometimes suddenly wander out into the blue like that, where you couldn't follow them? It was bad enough now with "shows" and expeditions on which they vanished periodically. If they could fly off into the skies as well, poor woman might give up trying to hold them at all. Unlesswhy not?-she should go with them, lend grace and lightness as well as lissom strength to the great wings. Why shouldn't a woman do as much as a man in that line? Surely if flight were to come, woman might claim her equal right of wings to soar above the dust and haze into the higher clearer level where legendary has always held her sphere to be. The thought fired her. Why shouldn't she try the new road with this dreamer? "Will you teach me some white vultures and the curvedwinged kites swam past on motionless outstretched wings, with slow lazy turnings of their heads, to look at the two engrossed figures in the rosered pavilion, until Colonel Smythe came shouting up the stairs to ask if they wanted to spend the whole night there. As they went down the broken steps the girl's head was in a whirl with angles of incidence and relative speeds and negative pressures; but the boy's head was also in a whirl with just something else, for "Parler de soi à celle qu'on aime, c'est presque parler amour," and talking of flight was to Manning practically "parler de soi," and-wellPat was-Pat. II. THE DAWN OF REALISATION. The squadron commander sat up and looked at his wristwatoh. "It's about time they started over," he said, "You've got a new roll of films in, Pat, haven't you? I'm very keen to have that snap of a bus just clearing the gate." "Yes, dear. I put one in before we started. The light's just right this evening, and if they come low down we ought to get a first-class picture. Do you remember when we sat on the gate tower and talked of possibilities, and you said that one day we would look out from here and see the troops of the future-horse and foot and birds?" "I should think I do, Pat, darling. I began to hope that day." He clasped the coel hand she laid on his shoulder as she sat leaning against one of the stone pillars of the pavilion on the Sher Mandal in Purana Qila. "And because hope sprang up, I forthwith began to babble hectically about angles of incidence and cambers and centres of pressure." "One can make love in most languages and dialects, I think, dear. You used to be really quite good at doing it in a terminology of liftdrift ratios, I remember," she smiled reminiscently. "Anyway, it was good for me, since "No, I don't, dear, but I've learnt to share your dreams a bit, especially the great one. Do you think we're tumbling on the edge of things a little now?" Billy Manning sat up and pointed to a kite wheeling round over the Qila Kuhna Mosque, the slow spirals bring. ing him past the Sher Mandal every half-minute or so. "Never a tremor of wing except just the flexing and twisting of the tips for balance as one uses one's ailerons. And yet he not only keeps in horizontal flight but climbs steadily. We know what his wing is the same cambered 'plane we use ourselves; we know its action, and we know that to secure lift from the air that wing must be driven through it at a certain minimum speed, a speed that you and I have calculated out dozens of times. We know that if the relative speed drops below that figure the lift will fall and the bird must glide down. down. There's nothing visible driving him through the air— he's stopped his engine so to speak, no longer flapping his wings-and yet he maintains sufficient flying speed to go on olimbing continuously and cireling by the half-hour. You can't assume that his original momentum keeps him going, because if you do you're abolishing air resistance and getting perpetual motion. "Therefore, one comes back always to the same conclusion, that some unknown force must be driving him through the air at a relative speed, high enough to give him a margin of lift and climb." "I know, dear: we've worked it out dozens of times and always come back to that. But what? .. what? what?" "God only knows!" said Billy. "He made the cambered wing that we've copied, and He made the bird; and now He's left us to find out, as He always does. That's what we were given brains for." "Is it heat or is it light or is it electricity?" said Pat reflectively. "Some force produced by the bird itself which sends it forward; some alteration in pressure front and rear. I suppose we shall stumble on it some day." "Some one some where some day," said Billy. "Perhaps you and I, Pat-who knows? It won't be for lack of searching." He threw a stone at the kite as it sailed by six feet away. The bird checked, swerved, and dived and zoomed back |