STORM BIRDS The first slow light of day, "under the opening eyelids of the morn," found the Master up in the screened observation gallery at the tip of the port aileron.

Here were mounted two of the six machine-guns that comprised _Nissr's_ heavier armament; and here, too, were hung a dozen of the wonderful life-preservers--combination anti-gravity turbines and vacuum-belt, each containing a signal-light, a water-distiller and condensed foods--that, invented by Brixton Hewes, soon after the close of the war, had done so much to make air-travel safe.
Major Bohannan was with the Master.

Both men, now in uniform, showed little effect of the sleepless night they had passed.

Wine of excitement and stern duties to perform, joined with powerful bodies, made sleeplessness and labor trivialities.
For an hour the two had been standing there, wrapped in their long military overcoats, while _Nissr_ had swooped on her appointed ways, with hurtling trajectory that had cleft the dark.

Somewhat warmed by piped exhaust-gases though the glass-enclosed gallery had been, still the cold had been marked; for without, in the stupendous gulf of emptiness that had been rushing away beneath and all about them, no doubt the thermometer would have sunk below zero.
_Nissr's_ altitude was now very great, ranging between 17,500 and 21,000 feet, so as to take advantage of the steady eastward setting wind in the higher air-lanes.