A Flying Triptych
I. INTO PALE ALTITUDES
THE airy desert that surrounds the earth in rising zones, each of a blue more wan and rare, has been charted as high as planes can fly or pilots breathe. These records read in feet, in pounds, in power, in rate of climb — all mechanical. The little box of polished wood and bright brass and steel, the barograph that I hold in my lap to cushion it from the last jarring of our landing gear against the hard earth which flings us finally into the air, will write a scrawl of nk on a blue-lined roll, to be checked and pondered over. But for me, as we gather speed in a first wide circle over the airdrome, under a clear sky of blue and gold light, there also begins a record that will still be ethereal on dull, repressive days, among walls and trees and people.
(500 feet) Almost at once, nosing up for the long pull, surroundings drop away; and if our arms, thrown wide, could infinitely expand as though taking a great breath, they would touch no lateral obstacle. In the prairies of the air there is no lateral dimension. Downward there is dimension, the most definite; upward also, but that is vague.
(2000 feet) Our airdrome lies on one of many low capes reaching out into sea and bay. The land contracts, but the sea expands to the horizon. Only in the air, or when we look at a globe, do we realize that the world is really two-thirds water. The monotony of a sea voyage and the constant changes of scene in land travel prevent true comparison under earth-bound circumstances.
(5000 feet) No one has yet painted the ocean from the air. When someone does, critics will be disappointed because it will no longer be a sea they recognize. All the liquid, fluent aspects will be gone. The waves will have stopped, the surface will be plane and frozen, and the aqueous blue, the ultramarine, the flowing purple, will be faded to an indeterminate sheen of ice and sky. The waves will be smoothed as a mason smooths cement, but the whitecaps will remain, wreathed and motionless on the surface, just as when sweepers, clearing the ice for a winter game, leave fine sweepings of powdery snow to mark the curves of ordered broom strokes on the rink, or when a strong gust of wind, blowing snow from the tops of drifts along the shore, dusts the ice with tenuous festoons.
Xenophon’s air scouts would never have cried, ‘Thalassa! Thalassa!’ into the roar of their loud-sounding propellers; they would have thought rather of the polished steel mirror over which some Lacedemonian girl bent with numb fingers, combing her hair on a winter morning.
(10,000 feet) In climbing, the engine always seems to labor. There is no sense of free flight, and if the observer does not wish to find himself always lifting forward in his seat with some involuntary idea of helping the plane, he had better keep his interest over the side.
(15,000 feet) Looking across from ocean to land again, it is now only a map we see, for not only have the ground forms shrunk to map size, but the various familiar colors have vanished. That is not home down there, but only the conventional, colorless symbol of it. The blue of the hills on the horizon has closed in, creeping beneath us, as the first wisps of oncoming fog precede the dark matrix bank. Perhaps a bit of warmth that is the green of a young, lonely tree, or the red of a roof, flashes through the blue, smoky haze for a last moment. Another hundred feet higher and it has gone. The lines of the ground forms are still distinct, but the whole world is blue — all the blues that range from wood smoke to silver.
(20,000 feet) Beauty lies in color, not in form or line. And blue is God’s color: see how much He uses it, especially in places He reserved to Himself so long. But Whistler soloed from Elysian Field over the Thames. I wonder at what altitude he painted. Our meter reads 20,000 now. And I had cautioned myself to take some oxygen at 18,000. Hateful to bother with it while the blues are so fine. How heavy is that familiar-looking glove that gropes for the tube. It misses. Now it is back. There! It has taken the tube and is bringing it up toward my face. Heavy. Heave — heave. Once more. Ah!
The weight is gone. And in its place, suddenly, I have a quick, logical fear. Thrusting forward, I pound the pilot’s shoulder. He turns his head, grins, makes the motion of putting a tube (his finger) in his mouth, and nods vigorously. Yes, he is using his oxygen flask. Quite right, too. Many good flyers have been spoiled by indulging in æsthetic lassitudes in high places. Such are the prerogatives of observers only.
II. THE SUNSHINE OF THE DEAD
Because we were born and live on the land, our minds enlarge it and our thoughts are based on it, although it is only a fringe to the sea and a focusing point for the spaces of the air. When we start on an ocean voyage we watch, at first, the land recede. Finally, toward the end of the first day, — so slow is water travel and so low the prospect, — the ‘old’ land is lost over the horizon astern. From then on, consciously or not, our expectant glances are always over the bows; we look for the ‘new’ land that surely lies ahead. Columbus would not have sailed into the West without belief in ultimate continents.
So in the air, when land is lost in haze, when all that remains to us is three paling shades of blue in lieu of land and sea and sky, we unconsciously cease to look down, and we look ahead, upward — for what?
As sailors have sailed out into the blue of sea and never returned, so flyers have flown into the blue of air and have not come back. The mystery of ocean is old, and thus we have legends of Atlantis and those ephemeral lands where the lost have found each other. So now, above, will not the wan light begin to color and deepen again to mark some airy Hy Brasil? Beyond a certain altitude will not the elastic pull of earth stretch thin and break? We have no right to believe there is something higher — our feelings are not proof of it; yet always, inevitably, above a certain point, we look up, expectant.
But the engine strains and labors. We gain no more. We shall not reach Hy Brasil on this voyage. The stick in front of me moves forward cautiously (our support is so tenuous now) and we nose into level flight. The strain is over. We sail freely in a pale infinity of shaded blue. The pilot cuts off the motor and in the vast silence turns to speak. I did not tell you before, but, to add the last touch to a dream, he is of another race — Oriental, Buddhist. And his precise, small voice comes back as through a telephone. He moves his arm across the void: —
‘I do not like up here. Desso-late. Desso-late.’
With earth and sea utterly relinquished, we have attained while still mortal the first experience and phase of immortality. Even the sun that we knew as golden and warm is a diffused radiance of silver, like northern lights. And we think: this cold glory was the last light they saw, those who came up before us and never returned — the sunshine of the dead.
III. THE RETURN OF OISIN
Oisin, son of an Irish king, went to live under the sea with the lady Niamh. After a year, vaguely troubled with the nightmare that he would never again reach earth, he begged from her the means of return and went back in spite of her warning and her grief. When he set foot on earth the magic fell away and the century of his faërie sojourn fell upon him. A bent old man sought friends long dead.
Our compass has lost its meaning. North, south, east, and west will not help us to find the earth we have left. If we should float into some hiatus in the natural laws we know, what unrecorded Odyssey would begin! But the pull of earth is still drawing; our bodies sense it though we have no other guide. Blessed Saint Gravity, the final patron of the upper air.
The scream of the motor is cut to a whisper in the void. We are dropping fast in great swooping circles, swallowing to soothe our clacking ears. The deep blue below melts toward the horizon as we bore down into it. The horizon is a circle, not an arc. Suddenly a ploughed field flashes as a streak of white among blue forests. The map emerges to meet us. It grows, rolling outward in all directions. Familiar ground forms appear. A tiny light pricks out. Down there it is almost dusk now, though our sun is turning more brilliant and golden. Suddenly its pink light strikes the ground and all the lost warm colors glow again.
There is only one zone left now. I lean over the side, breathing deep in anticipation. And it comes, warming and dispersing the keen, soulless air; the smell of soil and smoke and flowers, faint, homely, hardly sensed on earth, but to the flyer the poignant signal of return from the zones where there are no time and no space, where all senses are canceled except those of the process of thought and the motion of body in a medium too infinite itself to move.
After the loss of all criterions it is easy to fear lest we also have been away from earth too long. It is natural eagerly to watch the familiar landmarks appear, define themselves, and grow. But land and water, even brick and steel, remain for ages. Will those dark moving marks down there be the same folk we left? The tragedy of Oisin wells up as the motor roars and quiets, roars and quiets, in the last spiral before landing. The moving dots are people now, symbols no longer — people having only faces and shoulders, like cherubim.
And finally, as we float in, I distinguish one face I know so well, a pale carnation nestling in gray fur. Oisin is a myth. Our wheels strike. The trees and houses surround us again.