loon-house was the popular triumph of the experiment, for the crowd had at once taken cognizance of the perils of starting and landing.
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Straight as a dart the airship came speeding to us on the shore. The police of the Prince had with great difficulty cleared the Boulevard between the sea-wall and the wide-open doors of the balloon-house. Aids and super-numeraries stood with outstretched arms at the wall, waiting. Below, on the beach, stood others. The airship, however, seemed to have small need of them. Santos-Dumont had been slowing his speed gently. Just as he was half-way over the sea-wall he stopped the propeller. Carried on gently by its dying momentum, the airship glided on a few feet over our heads toward the open door. The aids had already grasped the guide-rope and drawn it down to its proper level. Now they walked beside it—into the balloon-house. Santos-Dumont had practically steered his airship into its ‘‘stable’’!
But the same afternoon a second flight, while showing again the airship’s speed and dirigibility, demonstrated the dangerous insufficiency of the landing space provided for it. This second adventure over the sea-wall proved that this permanent danger must be done away with. The Prince offered to tear down the wall.
‘‘I will not ask you to do so much as that,’’ replied M. Santos-Dumont. ‘‘It may be sufficient to build up a landing-stage on the sea side of it, at the level of the Boulevard and the floor of the Aerodrome.’’
This is what was done, after twelve days of work interrupted by persistent rain. The air-ship, when issuing from its house for a third flight, on the 10th of February, had simply to be lifted a few feet by men on each side of the wall, who gently drew it on until its whole length floated in equilibrium over a platform extending so far out into the surf that the farthermost piles were always in six feet of water. On this platform stood the aids who held the airship while the chief machinist started the motor, and M. Santos-Dumont let out the water-ballast, still leaving the whole system a trifle heavier than the air.
It rose gently from the open platform, its shifting weights so arranged as to point its nose obliquely upward. The motor was already spitting and snapping amid its steady thunder-growl. On the instant the power was transferred to the propeller, its first revolutions sent the gently rising airship into the air as if it had received a mighty push from behind. Gathering force, it sped still obliquely upward, until, with a single masterly movement, the air-navigator was seen to shift his weights and bring his system to a level, onward course.
And so it darted out to sea, its scarlet pennant bearing the mystic initials fluttering like a streak of flame behind. The initial letters are those of the first line of Camoëns’ ‘‘Lusiad’’—the epic poem of the aëronaut’s race—P.M.N.D.A.N. Por mares nunca d’antes navegados (“By seas yet unexplored”).
