The two upper nuts were within easy reach, but the lower ones were so far beneath the opening through which I leaned that almost my entire body was hanging out of the porthole before I could reach them with my hand.

Almost immediately after the first flash of lightning rain commenced to fall in torrents. I could feel it beating the dirigible lower and lower, pressing it down with the weight of a million tiny hands. The gondola was whipping this way and that. Momentarily, I expected to be pitched headlong into the sea.

At last I got a bite on one of the lower nuts with the wrench. It was a large, heavy nut screwed firmly down upon a lock washer. Even under favorable conditions it would have been hard to start; now it appeared hopeless. But one never knows to what heights of achievement he may rise until Death has him by the tail with a downhill pull.

I threw every ounce of strength and all the weight that I dared into a supreme effort-and the nut started. After that it was easy, as far as that nut was concerned. The wind and the rain were cold, but by the time that nut dropped into the ocean I was wringing wet with perspiration as well as rainwater.

The second of the lower nuts gave me a terrible battle; it seemed to have been turned home even more firmly than its fellow. Then, even after I got it started and turned part way off, another obstacle presented itself; the threads near the end of the bolt had been jammed! And now the ocean was perilously close beneath; some of the mightier waves rose almost to the gondola.

To turn off the nut over the jammed threads was a slow and arduous job, and always the ocean was reaching its cold claws up to drag me down. There are a lot of people who love the ocean; I used to think that I did, but I don't try to fool myself anymore-I hate it. It is beautiful in its own sinister way in many of its moods; but is like a cold, hard woman of the underworld, whose hands are stained with the blood of many men, who, like the ocean, has murdered her lovers.

When that second nut fell I was almost exhausted, but I might not even pause to catch my breath. Immediately I fell to work upon one of the upper nuts. A great wave rose far above any that had preceded it, and at the same moment some vagary of the storm forced the dirigible suddenly a little lower. I felt the gale-swept spindrift driving against my cheek, and the next instant the crest of a wave slapped resoundingly against the bottom of the dirigible.

Death seemed very close. I could feel his cold hands in the chill of the up-reaching waves. The voice of the gale was the howling of his ghostly retinue. That time Death had missed me by a few feet; but next time he might not, for once we dropped low enough to permit a single wave to break above the sills of the gondola's windows we should never rise again; and each succeeding wave would drag us deeper.

I knew that getting nervous and excited would not help matters any, and so I worked as calmly and coolly as I would have had no emergency existed. I must admit that it took a lot of willpower to do it and that inwardly I was frantic. Some malign force seemed to prevent those nuts from starting until I felt that further effort was useless; then they would give a little, grudgingly. Afterward, the slow process of turning the nut off the bolt, the rain, the wind, the thunder, and the lightning all combining with the bucking of the gondola to tear the wrench from my cold-numbed fingers, almost jolted my mind loose from its foundations.

But at last the third nut dropped into the sea. Only one was left. As I worked on it another wave struck the gondola, this time higher up. A little wave dashed through the broken window. Another of those big fellows would swamp us.

The engine frame was still hanging on the protruding bolts, and I was commencing to fear that I might have difficulty in prying it off after I got the fourth nut removed. This one had started more easily than the others, and I was laboriously turning it off when a mountainous wave struck the gondola a terrific blow. The frail ship staggered and reeled, and as it did so the engine frame slipped from the heads of the three bolts from which I had removed the nuts; the gondola shipped water, and its stern dropped into the trough behind the sea that had struck it. The engine swung free; and its weight, combined with the sudden, twisting jerk of the gondola, snapped the remaining bolt.

As the engine disappeared beneath the waves, the stern of the gondola rose above the next comber; a moment later a flash of lightning showed me that the ship was rising. I drew my body back through the porthole and sat down on the floor of the cabin, my back against a wall. I was exhausted.