Crash in the Desert

I PAID my last visit to the Weather Bureau. Like an alchemist intent upon his crucibles, M. Viard was compiling the day’s pressure charts, plotting out their elements. With my friend Lucas beside me, I watched the winds stream out across the map in long lianas spiked here and there with thorns. A large brownish-yellow chart — the color of the soil of Asia — displayed the world’s depressions.

‘We shan’t hit that one before Monday,’ I remarked.

Another tangle of wind streams writhed like some black demon spread-eagled above Norway and Russia, while a pygmy devil gyrated over Basra.

‘That little chap’s a nuisance,’ Viard observed.

‘A sandstorm?’ I inquired.

I was due at Basra after dark. It was a disagreeable prospect, landing in one of those Mesopotamian sandstorms which turn the air into a yellow furnace, obliterating mountains, towns, and rivers, and blending earth and sky in one vast conflagration. The thought of plunging down across the darkness into the chaos of a world in the making, of weltering elements, dismayed me.

‘No, that’s not a sandstorm.’

Greatly relieved, I cast a glance around the room. The laboratory atmosphere pleased me; this place was insulated from all that was not science. As he took off his coat and hat and hung them on yonder peg, Viard had discarded, too, the outside world; on the threshold of this room, as on the threshold of a wireless operator’s cabin, a hermit’s cave, or an observatory, domestic and financial worries, the importunities of sentiment, lapsed into nonentity. Viard was one of those men who, between four bare walls, secluded in their cells, enter into communion with the universe.

I noticed him rubbing his palms gently together — a sign that he was pondering.

‘No,’ he murmured. ‘That’s not sand, and I’ll show you why.’ With his forefinger he pointed to certain other patterns on the chart. . . .

It was four in the morning when Lucas shook me into consciousness.

‘Wake up! . . . This paper shows the state of the moon, d’you see? You’ll have an hour or two of moonlight to-night, till ten or thereabouts. Not much, however — it’s a new moon. And there’s your “sun,” in G. M. T. with the local time beside it. These are your maps with the capes inked in, and here — ’

‘And here,’ my wife broke in, ‘here’s your kit for Saïgon.’

A razor, one clean shirt. How good it is to travel light, almost as light as air!

It was time to set out for the airport at Le Bourget. Meanwhile, under cover of the darkness, destiny was planning its campaign, stage by gradual stage consolidating its positions. The moonlight that was due to fail at ten, those favoring winds that were to turn, were part of a concerted scheme.

At the airport it was cold and dark. The Simoon was rolled out of her hangar. I inspected my plane, running the back of my hand over the wings — almost a lover’s caress! I had flown her eight thousand miles, and not once had the engine let me down, had a single bolt worked loose. A splendid machine she was, destined to save our lives on the coming night and marvelously outride the crash.

Friends had come to see us off. There is a family likeness about the starts of long-distance flights, an atmosphere which, once experienced, one can never do without. There is a particular thrill in everything — in the wind, in the rainswept dawn, the low - pitched drone of the engine as it warms up, the immaculate, enameled surfaces of the great machine poised for its leap into the void. Already you have a foretaste of the far-flung glories of the route, the green and brown and yellow pageant of the maps, the rosary of sonorous names you are to tell, and all the hours that one by one will be caught up and cast behind on your long sunward progress.

There is glamour even in the little cabin where one moors the Thermos flasks, spare parts, and tiny handbags; in the fuel tanks replete with power; and, above all, in the magic instruments that glow star-scattered on their panel like a pale constellation on the night sky. One comes to love the steely glint of artificial horizons, of gadgets built to plumb the depths of air. The little cabin is a place apart where a man can feel at home.

I took off. Despite the heavy load there was no hitch in getting clear. Nimbly I spurned Paris with a heel kick. The lights of Melun glimmered underfoot. Flying low, I picked my way between the rain squalls. I was heading for the valley of the Loire, for Nevers and Lyons. The going was heavy through the Rhine Valley. Mount Ventoux was bonneted with snow clouds. Then came Marignan and Marseilles. Everything seemed whisked away from under me, as in a dream. I was bound for a far country, so far away that these brief distances were covered before I could take stock of them.

Good work! I thought. Time’s running like a millrace! There are days when, after seemingly a quarter of an hour’s flight, one glances at one’s wrist watch — to find five minutes gone. And there are days when, between two glances, the hands have jumped a semicircle. To-day, thank goodness, time was streamlined! A good omen. . . .

The sea came into sight. Suddenly I grew aware that something odd was happening; a patch of mist seemed dancing round the petrol gauge on my left wing.

‘Prévot!’ I shouted. My mechanic bent towards me. ‘Look! That’s petrol vapor, is n’t it? Flowing damned fast, it seems to me! ’

After a look at the gauge Prévot merely shook his head.

‘Better check up how much we’ve used,’ I insisted.

It was n’t time to make the turn yet; we were still on the straight hop to Tunis. Glancing round, I saw Prévot examining the second tank. Presently he came back to me.

‘We’ve run through over two hundred litres,’ he said.

Seventy litres too much — seventy litres scattered to the winds. A serious leak. I decided to turn back. We touched earth again at Marignan. Drinking a cup of coffee, I was conscious of the minutes trickling away as blood seeps from a wound. One of the pilots of the AirFrance Line accosted me.

‘Where are you going? Saïgon or Madagascar? ’

‘Saïgon.’

‘Good luck, old chap!’

The repairs were finished, tanks refilled. Without much trouble, despite the full load and some rather nasty jolts due to the sodden ground, I took off rapidly.

Before me lay the sea.

At once I ran into low-lying clouds, and came down to sixty feet. Rain squalls blustered against the wind screen; the waves were capped with spindrift. I strained my eyes to see ahead and avoid collision with the mast of some tall ship. Prévot lit a cigarette for me.

‘The coffee, please.’

He vanished into the stern of the cockpit and came back with the flask. I took a drink. From time to time I flicked the throttle to keep her at exactly 2100 revolutions. Now and again I ran my eyes over the instrument panel and reviewed my troops. One and all were in good order; each dial hand was where it should be. Glancing down, I saw the sea bubbling like a seething cauldron under the downpour. Were I the pilot of a seaplane, I’d have cursed the bumpy seas; for us, however, a sea ‘landing,’ rough or smooth, was out of the question. Oddly enough that knowledge gave me an absurd sense of safety. The sea lay clean outside my world; a breakdown here could simply be ruled out, need not be reckoned with at all. My Simoon was no amphibian.

After an hour and a half the rain eased off. The clouds still hung very low, but sunlight, like a genial smile, was breaking through them. I was enthralled by this rehearsal of a sunny day. A film of snow-white vapor floated still above my head, but now I gauged its thinness. I swerved aside to dodge a squall; no longer need I drive straight through it. And there — there surely was the first rift in the cloud bank.

I guessed its imminence before it caught my eyes; just in front, upon the waves, glimmered a long avenue green as a water meadow, an oasis of verdure. It brought to my mind one of those lush barley fields of South Morocco, which always had enchanted me when I came homing back from Senegal, after two thousand miles of flight above the desert. Now, too, I had an impression of entering a habitable tract, and my heart grew light. I threw a backward glance at Prevot, and shouted: —

‘We’re through the muck! That’s fine!’

‘Fine!’ he echoed.

No acrobatic feats would now be needed when brusquely Sardinia hove into view. We should not sight it looming up some fifty yards ahead, like a tall derelict; the island would emerge slowly, sedately, in a sheen of broken lights.

So now at last we entered the kingdom of the sun. I was loafing — there is no better word for it — loafing along at 150 miles an hour.

I lit my cigarettes slowly, sipped mycoffee slowly, keeping meanwhile a fatherly, protective eye on my large family of flying gadgets. Indeed, what with the sunbeams and the shining clouds, the flight seemed tranquil as a Sunday afternoon promenade en famille. The sea was checkered, like a French countryside, with strips of blue and violet and green. Here and there, at the edge of a rain squall, it broke into flowers of white spray. Once again I realized that the sea is anything but monotonous; its surface is continually changing. A gust of wind mantles it with light, or strips it bare.

‘Look!’

I showed Prévot the Sardinian coast line, which we should follow on our journey south. Sitting beside me, he gazed frowningly at the mountains casting off their shrouds of mist. As the clouds were blown away the island showed its profile, all in obtuse angles. We had won height and were flying at 4500 feet. I coasted past the villages that dot the foreshore. A welcome change from the sea spaces, flower-strewn yet desolate. For a while I hugged the smiling, mothering coast; then, breaking away, I headed south, for Tunis.

Bizerta welcomed us to Africa. Already I had begun to descend, for here I could dispense with altitude — the pilot’s nest egg, so to speak, his standby in adversity. When it becomes unneeded, he does not squander it, but barters it for another form of wealth. A quarter of an hour before landing he sets the controls for the descent, retards the engine just enough to prevent it from racing, and the speedometer jumps from 150 to 200 miles per hour. At that speed, light eddies of the evening air drum lightly on the wings, and you seem planing down across a mass of limpid crystal, of air so softly tremulous that even a swallow’s passage jars it like a gunshot.

Now we had run out of altitude and were following the undulations of the foothills; I made the airport at the level of hangars and touched earth.

While the tanks were filling I signed papers and shook friendly hands. Then, just as I stepped forth from the airport offices, I heard a sinister thud — one of those muffled impacts that signify so much. A sound without an echo, selfcontained, pregnant with fatality. No sooner had I heard it than I remembered having heard once before just such another noise, the noise of an explosion in a garage. That hoarse grunt had announced two men’s death. I glanced towards the road running beside the landing ground. A puff of smoking dust was rising where two racing cars had crashed head-on, wrenched out of speed into a frozen immobility. People were running towards the wreckage; others in our direction, shouting.

‘Telephone . . . A doctor, quick. His head is . . .’

And suddenly my heart sank. Here, in the quiet evening light, fate had brought off one of its ugly coups. Beauty had been ravaged; a life, a consciousness, wiped out. I recalled an experience in the desert. Thus the marauders had come their stealthy way, on soundless feet padding across the sands; then suddenly upon our camp had fallen the shrill tumult of a razzia. A moment later all had sunk back again into a golden calm. Here now was the same hush, an ominous silence. Someone beside me began to talk excitedly of a broken skull. But I had no mind to hear about that lifeless, bloodstained forehead; turning my back on the motor road, I strode back to my plane, my mind dark with foreboding. Yet again that day, and very soon, I was to hear it, that muffled sound of impact, as the Simoon crashed into the stony rubble at 160 miles an hour, the snarl of fate keeping its grim appointment.

I set my course for Benghazi.

II

We had only two hours’ daylight left. I had taken off my glare glasses as we reached the Tripoli frontier. The sand was turning gold. Once more it flashed on me how empty is this planet of ours; surely its rivers, woods, and human habitations are mere happy flukes of Nature, due to chance coincidence! How vast a portion of our globe is barren rock and sand!

Yet, I reflected, in reality these things are no concern of mine; my world is the realm of flight. Here, from my vantage point, I can watch the slow advance of night, the shadows closing in around me like the hallowed twilight of a shrine — a sanctuary where, by grace of occult rites, the worshiper is plunged in an inviolable meditation. All the world profane that lies about me is fading out, soon to vanish utterly. Pale yellow light still bathes the plains, yet something imperceptible is passing from it.

Nothing on earth is comparable with an aerial nightfall; all who have felt the magic ecstasy of flight will boar me out. I am not thinking of such as reckon flying merely one of many pastimes for an empty hour. I have in mind those pilots who have devoted their lives to aviation, given up so many things at its behest. Men like the pilot Mermoz, who once said to me: ‘There’s nothing like it, even if it beats you in the end! ’ Nothing like it — yet why it’s hard to say. That experience of a gradual ascent from inessentials to essentials is, perhaps, shared by the novice entering a monastic order; by slow degrees he learns to forgo the world, to spurn the quest of riches, to renounce even love. To find, maybe, the God behind the veil.

I, too, am forsaking something at this moment, those golden plains that, did my engine fail, would have befriended me. I am relinquishing the landmarks that might have given me my bearings; renouncing, too, the outline of the mountains etching their danger signals on the blue. I am entering the night — a navigator steering only by the stars.

The world of light dies a slow death. Little by little the beacon of the day burns out, while earth and sky grow indistinguishable. The earth seems to be streaming up into the air and mingling with it, like a mist. The earliest stars are shimmering as if they shone across green depths of water; many hours will pass before they change to clean-cut diamonds; many hours, too, before the shooting stars begin their aerial frolics. Some nights I have seen so many trails of falling fire that one might have fancied a great gale was blowing overhead amongst the stars.

Prevot tested the fixed lights and emergency lamps. We wrapped the bulbs in tissue paper.

‘How about another layer round that one?’

After adding it he touched a switch; the light was still too bright. As on a photographic plate, it would fog the pale aspect of the outer world, effacing the faint gleams that sometimes, even in the darkest nights, still linger on the surfaces of things. Night had fallen, but not completely yet; a crescent moon still hung on the horizon. Prévot dived into the recesses of the plane and came back with a sandwich. I nibbled a grape. I wasn’t hungry; neither hungry nor thirsty. Nor was I tired at all; I felt as if I could carry on for ten days, for a decade if need be.

The moon had set. In the black night Benghazi was invisible, crouching in a pit of darkness so intense as to be haloless. I located the town only when I was just above it. While I was groping for the aerodrome, the red ground lights lit up, framing a black rectangle. I banked. A searchlight, aimed at the zenith, shot up straight as the jet from a fireman’s hose; then pivoted, and traced a golden causeway across the landing ground. I circled once again so as to have a clear view of obstacles, then let my engine idle and, like a diver plunging into a sombre lake, planed down through the darkness.

It was 11 P.M., local time, when I landed at Benghazi, full of admiration for its night equipment. As I taxied over to the light tower, officers and men — surely the world’s most courteous soldiery! — streamed out of the shadows and crossed the zone of light, seen and unseen by turns. Our identity papers were rapidly checked while the tanks were filling. Twenty minutes sufficed for all formalities — I was charmed by such solicitude.

‘Do a circle above our heads once you ’re up,’ one of the officers requested, ‘ so as to let us know you ’ve made a good take-off.’

I rolled along the golden avenue towards an open gap. Even with an overload of fuel the Simoon was off the ground before I’d reached the limit of the field. At first the following searchlight handicapped my turn; then, realizing evidently that it blinded me, they swung it aside. I turned at once, and zoomed; the flail of light just brushed my forehead, then quickly swerved into another quadrant. I shall not soon forget that tactful handling of the searchlight, its friendly send-off as I headed cast across the desert.

The weather reports from Paris, Tunis, and Benghazi announced a following wind, velocity 25 miles per hour; I reckoned on a flying speed of about 190 miles an hour. I set my course on the middle of a straight line drawn between Cairo and Alexandria. Thus I would skirt the ‘forbidden’ zone along the coast and, allowing for a margin of drift, would probably pick up the lights of one or another of these cities to port or starboard. Failing these, I could not miss the lights of the Nile Valley. If the wind velocity kept constant, we had three-and-twenty minutes’ flight before us; some twentyfive minutes more if it declined. Six hundred and forty miles of desert lay ahead.

Now there was no moon to help us; the air seemed brimming over with a flood of darkness. No light of any kind, no landmarks would be visible along our route. Moreover, as the Simoon was not equipped with wireless, we were cut off from human guidance till we reached the Nile. Riveting my eyes on the Sperry gyroscope, I paid no heed to anything but the thick filament of phosphorescence that slowly, rhythmically, ebbed and flowed on the dark dial of the instrument. Whenever Prevot shifted his position I gently brought our centre of gravity back to plumb.

We rose to six thousand feet; at that height, according to the weather reports, the wind was favorable. Sometimes I switched a lamp on so as to read such of the instruments as had not luminous hands or dials. Most of the time, however, I sat in pitch-darkness, watching the tiny stellar system on my instrument panel glimmering with a mineral radiance mysterious and inexhaustible as the stars’. I felt like an astronomer, a studious, single-minded savant, poring over a celestial chart — the twinkling constellation of my flying instruments. Nothing was here that might distract my mind; the outside world had passed away. And now that Prévot, for all his efforts, was dozing off, my solitude was all the more delectable. Contentedly I listened to the gentle drone of my sturdy little motor, my eyes fixed on the tranquil starlight, my private firmament serenely shining.

Sleep, it seemed, I could dispense with. If this mood of calm well-being persisted over the following night I need not halt again upon my way to Saïgon. Indeed the flight impressed me now as relatively short — now that Benghazi, the only tricky landing on the route, had doused its lights and settled down behind the dark horizon to the shuttered sleep of night-bound cities.

Meanwhile my mind was active. We had no moonlight to assist us, no radio. No link, not the frailest, would connect us with the world of men until we breasted the ribbon of lights along the Nile. Out of touch with everything! Yet, for all that, I felt no anxiety. If my engine began to splutter I should be no more startled than if my heart should miss a beat. My thoughts drifted back to Sabathier, the white-haired engineer with the young, sparkling eyes. I failed to see what distinction could be drawn, in respect of human values, between such a career as his and that of a great painter, a composer’s, or a poet’s. I visualized those hands of his, a watchmaker’s hands, which had shaped this wonder of mechanical precision. How likable they are, men who have labored much, and lovingly!

‘Can’t I make this modification?’ I. had asked.

‘I don’t advise you to.’

Our last words together echoed in my memory. He did n’t advise me to — that settled it! Like a doctor’s opinion; and, when a doctor has that look in his eyes, you trust him without demur. It was Sabathier’s handiwork that held us up, enabled us to ride the black abyss below. We were crossing the dark valley of a fairy tale, the supreme test of the hero’s courage. Here, too, no help was to be hoped for, no pardon for a blunder. We were on the knees of the gods.

A ray of light was filtering through a chink in the electric standard. I woke Prévot and asked him to extinguish it. After some bear-like scrabbling and snorting in the darkness he came forward and busied himself with a mysterious contraption of handkerchiefs and black paper. At last the light was gone — and a good riddance from my world of shadows! Its blatancy had clashed with the pale, ethereal glimmer of the radium, as the glare of a cabaret offends the starlight. But, worst of all, it had dazzled me, killed all other radiance. To myself I said: Another symbol. . . .

Three hours had passed. Suddenly, on my right, a bright glow caught my eyes. I stared at it incredulously. A streamer of light seemed hooked on to the lamp at the wing tip, which till now had been invisible. It shone with a fitful fluorescence, now brilliant, now subdued. I was entering a cloud, and the wing light was reflected on it. Nearing my landmarks, I’d have preferred a cloudless sky. Gradually the light grew steady and blossomed out in pinkish petals, like a bouquet of bright flowers pinned to the fabric, lighting up the surface of the wing. Great eddies heaved us to and fro. We were flying through the heart of a cloud bank whose depth I could not gauge. I rose to six thousand feet without coming clear. I dived down to three hundred; still the pink glow clung to the wing, growing steadily brighter.

Well, there was nothing for it but to carry on. Once we were through the murk, we’d see. Yet it worried me, that evil glow, like the lamp outside a tavern of ill fame.

I tried to figure out the situation. ‘It’s rough going hereabouts, but that was to be expected; even flying high, in a clear sky, we’ve had eddies all the way. The wind has n’t dropped; we must be doing over 180 miles an hour. But really I ’ve nothing definite to go on; I ’ll try to find my bearings when we ’re through the cloud.’

We flew out of it. The pink flowers vanished like a wraith. That gave me my lead. Looking ahead, I saw, as far as it is possible to see the void, a narrow rift of open air and the next cloud bank looming, like a wail, ahead. The pink bouquet lit up again.

I could only count on a few seconds’ respite, here and there, from the peasoup vapor. After three and a half hours’ flight I began to feel bewildered. If my reckoning was correct we should be near the Nile. With luck I might be able to spot it across the rifts, but they were few and far between. I dared not come down yet; if I’d overestimated our speed we were still flying over high land.

I still felt no anxiety. Aly only fear was that time might presently be wasted. But I set a limit to my peace of mind: four and a quarter hours’ flight; thereafter, even assuming there was no wind (which was unlikely), I should certainly have overshot the Nile.

As I reached the fringes of the cloud bank, the pink bouquet flashed off and on, like a revolving light, at ever shorter intervals. Suddenly it died out. I had no relish for these dot-and-dash confabulations with the powers of darkness.

A green star, flashing like a lighthouse, lit up ahead. Was it a lighthouse or a star? I wondered. I felt no better liking for this phantom light, like a false Star of Bethlehem, risen in the East and luring us, it might be, to disaster.

Prévot, who had just awakened, switched his torch on to the engine dials; I waved him away, him and his light. We were in a gap between two clouds, and I must make the most of every chance to see below. Prévot dozed off again. I could see nothing.

We had now been four hours and five minutes in the air. Prévot came and sat beside me.

‘We can’t be far from Cairo now,’ he remarked.

‘Obviously.’

‘Is it a star, that light ahead — or is it a lighthouse?’

I had slowed down the engine a little. Prévot, sensitive to the least alteration in a motor’s rhythm, had doubtless been awakened by the change. I began a gradual descent, so as to glide below the mass of cumulus.

Meanwhile I had been studying my maps; there could be no doubt that we had reached the region of zero elevation above sea level, so I had nothing to fear in coming down. I continued the descent, heading north, for thus I hoped to catch a glimpse of lighted towns across my windows. It was certain we had overshot the Nile cities, but I expected them to show up on our left. We had come down below the cloud and were skirting the edge of another low-hanging cloud bank on our left. Turning a little,

I headed north-northeast, to keep clear of its meshes.

This second cloud bank hung even lower than the first, blotting out the horizon. I dared not lose any more altitude; true, the altimeter registered 1200 feet, but I had no idea of the atmospheric pressure in these parts.

‘We’ll carry on like this till we reach the sea,’ I shouted in Prévot’s ear. ‘Then I’ll come right down. I don’t want to risk a crash.’

As a matter of fact, for all I knew we were already above the sea; it depended on our driftage. Under the cloud bank the visibility was absolutely nil. Like a man crouching over a dead fire, raking the embers vainly to retrieve the flame of life in their recesses, I pressed my eyes against the window trying to discern a light, a signal of man’s presence in the darkness.

‘ There’s a lighthouse! ’

Both of us noticed it in the same moment — a revolving light. What madness had come over us to see just there, just then, that phantom lighthouse, figment of the night? At the very instant Prevot and I bent down to see if we could locate it again 900 feet below our wings, at that precise moment . . .

‘Ah!’

That, I believe, was all I said. And all I felt was a terrific impact that rocked our world to its foundations. We had crashed into the ground at 160 miles an hour.

For a split second, as far as I recall, my mind was tense with expectation of a blinding flash of violet light, the star burst of the explosion when, together, we went up in flames. Yet neither Prévot nor I felt the least emotion. All I discovered in myself was that feeling of suspense, heightened to the breaking point, the vision of that bursting star.

But the violet star, the flames, did not materialize. Instead there was a sort of earthquake which wrecked the cabin, wrenched out windows, and sent sheets of metal hurtling into space a hundred yards around us. I felt its din go roaring down to the pit of my stomach, while the whole machine quivered like a knife blade launched from a great height into a block of wood. A savage, elemental force was kneading our bodies into a pulp. It went on for a second, for two seconds — would it never end? Breathlessly I waited for the forces pent within the plane to shatter it like a bursting bomb. But still the subterranean shocks continued, without leading to the final cataclysm.

I was completely baffled by the unseen forces at work; I could make nothing of the incessant quaking, the malevolence that mauled us — and our incredible reprieve. Five seconds passed, six seconds. Then suddenly we felt a spinning movement, a shock that jerked our cigarettes out of the windows and splintered the right wing. Then — a great silence, frozen immobility.

‘Jump!’ I cried to Prévot, who at the selfsame moment shouted, ‘Fire!’

In a flash we had vaulted through the wreckage of a window and put some sixty feet between us and the plane.

‘Not hurt?’ I asked Prévot.

‘Not a scratch,’ he replied; but I saw him rubbing his knee.

‘Feel your body all over,’ I suggested. ‘Move about a bit. Quite sure there are no bones broken?’

‘It’s nothing, really, only that damned spare pump . . .’

I quite expected to see him fall headlong, split in two from head to navel! ‘ That . . . pump! ’ he repeated, his eyes fixed in a glassy stare. Off his head! I thought. Next thing he’ll be dancing a jig!

At last he took his eyes off the wrecked plane, now that the risk of fire was definitely over.

‘It’s nothing to speak of,’ he said. ‘The spare pump got me in the knee, that’s all.’

III

We had escaped by a miracle. By the light of my electric torch I retraced the tracks our plane had made along the ground. Two hundred and fifty yards back from the place where it had come to rest, scraps of twisted steel and metal plates littered the soil. It was not till daybreak that I discovered our actual point of Impact; we had hit at a steep angle the summit of a little plateau slightly higher than the surrounding desert. Here the sand was deeply scored, as by a ploughshare. Luckily the plane had not capsized, but dragged its belly along the ground. Our tracks might have been made by some infuriated reptile lashing out with its tail — a reptile traveling at 160 miles an hour! Hereabouts the surface of the desert, was strewn with round black stones, to which presumably we owed our lives; rolling freely on the sand, they had acted as ball bearings. The air must have been thick with them as we shot ahead.

Prevot switched off the accumulators, to guard against a belated outbreak of fire due to a short circuit. Leaning on the engine, I tried to figure out our position; for four hours and a quarter we had been flying in thirty-mile wind, — the air high up had certainly been bumpy, — but it might well have veered after the forecast; there was no knowing. The nearest I could get to our position was that we were somewhere in a square each side of which extended 250 miles.

Prévot came up and sat beside me. ‘It’s a marvel we’re alive,’ he said.

I made no reply; I was feeling far from cheerful. An idea, trivial but rather tiresome, was worming its way into my mind.

After telling Prévot to keep his lamp on so as to guide me back, I began walking forward, carefully examining the ground with my electric torch. I advanced in a wide semicircle, deviating now and then in various directions. All the time I kept my eyes fixed on the soil, like a man hunting for a jewel he has dropped, and as a little while before I had eye-raked the darkness for a gleam of light. ‘So that’s it — just as I expected,’ I murmured to myself as I slowly walked back to the plane. Sitting beside the cockpit, I thought things out. I ’d been looking for some reason to hope, and failed to find it; hunting for some sign of life, but life had shown no sign.

‘Prévot, I have n’t found a single blade of grass.’

He said nothing — had he understood ? Well, we could come back to the subject when the curtain rose, at dawn. Meanwhile all I felt was a great weariness. Lost in the desert, with a 250-mile margin of error — here was food for thought! Suddenly I leapt to my feet.

‘How about the writer?’

Our water tanks and fuel tanks had caved in. Gone, too, was our reserve of drinking water — soaked into the sand. All that remained was a pint or so of coffee in a battered Thermos flask, half a pint of white wane in another. After filtering these liquids we mixed them together. There were a few grapes and an orange. ‘Barely enough,’ I thought, ‘to see us through five hours’ parch across the desert under the sun.’

We moved into the cabin, there to await the dawn. Hoping to sleep, I stretched myself full length on the floor. But once again, before my eyes closed, I took stock of the situation. We had practically no notion of our whereabouts; less than a quart of liquid to share between us. Supposing this place lay somewhere on the straight line BenghaziCairo, we should be discovered in a week or so — that was the earliest we could reckon on, and that would be too late. If we’d drifted off our course it might be a matter of six months. No use counting on our fellow airmen — they would have some two thousand miles to cover in their search.

‘Yes, that was a damned pity,’ Prévot suddenly observed.

‘What was?’

‘With a little luck we’d have got it over in the crash!’

But it was far too early to throw up the sponge; we pulled ourselves together. After all there was a chance — a slender one, but not to be ignored — that by some miracle an airplane might turn up in the nick of time. Then again, there might be an oasis near by; we could n’t afford to stand pat by the wreck. We decided to keep moving throughout the next day, returning to the plane at nightfall. Before starting we would write out our programme in capital letters on the sand.

Curling myself into a ball, I settled down to sleep. The prospect of a few hours’ rest delighted me. But, in my exhaustion, a horde of unseen presences seemed thronging round me; the desert was astir with them. And in my halfsleep phantom voices buzzed in my cars, whispering confidences, recalling longlost memories. Still I was not thirsty yet; I felt quite well, and could embark on sleep as on a pleasant voyage. In dreams realities take second place. . . .

But what a change came with the daylight! Before this I had often slept out in the Sahara, in the unpacified tracts, and had greatly liked that desert. Then I had awakened to see a vast expanse of golden sand, fretted into ripples by the wind waves. And, sleeping under my wing, I had tranquilly awaited rescue. But our present plight was all too different. . . .

We made our way along the slopes of rolling dunes. Everywhere the sand was coated with a layer of bright black pebbles that looked like flakes of metal; the dunes seemed clad in burnished coats-ofmail. We had crashed upon a mineral world; hills of iron hemmed us in.

Once we had scaled the nearest summit, another dome exactly like it showed up, black and shining, in the offing. As we walked we dragged our feet, along the ground so as to leave a well-marked trail, for the return journey. We headed towards the rising sun. Logically, this was the last direction we should have taken; all the available data, weather reports, and the duration of our flight, led us to think that we had crossed the Nile. But I had already made a short reconnaissance to the west, and had felt a vague, inexplicable foreboding. So I let the west stand over for to-day. And, though the sea lay to the north, I had decided against that direction, too.

Even three days later when, driven by thirst, we resolved to abandon the wrecked plane for good and to walk straight ahead until we dropped, it was once more towards the east that we set forth — or, more precisely, east-northeast. That, too, was quite irrational, logically hopeless. Nevertheless, after the rescue we were to learn that no alternative direction would have saved us; had we set out northwards, our strength would have given out before we reached the sea. Absurd as it may seem, I now think that my choice fell on the east simply because a similar decision had saved my friend, the pilot Guillaume, in the Andes, where I had gone in quest of him. And, by some obscure process, I had come to look on this direction as the way to life.

After we had walked five hours the landscape changed. We came to a valley through which a river of sand seemed flowing. We ploughed our way along the valley, taking long strides, for we had to cover as much ground as possible, returning before night if we discovered nothing. Suddenly I stopped.

‘Prévot!’

‘What’s up?’

‘The trail!’

How long had we been forgetting to mark the trail? If we could n’t pick it up again we were done for!

We turned back, deviating slightly to the right. Our plan was, when we had gone far enough, to turn left at a right angle so as to intersect our earlier tracks at a point where we still were marking them.

Once we had restored the broken links, we started off again. The temperature was rising, the desert shimmering with mirage. But so far the mirages were vague and inchoate. Vast lakes took form and vanished as we neared them. We decided to cross the valley of sand and climb the highest dune, so as to have an open view. We had been six hours afoot and, judging by our stride, must have covered over twenty miles. When we had reached the summit of the black dome of sand, we sat down in silence.

Below us the sandy valley debouched on a pebbleless expanse of sand ablaze with dazzling light that seared our eyes. On every hand was empty desert. Only, on the horizon, under the play of distant light, the mirages were taking on stranger, more perplexing forms — fortresses and minarets, elaborate structures all in vertical lines. There was also a large black patch that looked like vegetation; but above it hung the last of the clouds that had dissolved into the sunlight and would return at nightfall. The dark patch was only a cloud shadow.

To carry on was futile; it would have led nowhere. We decided to go back to our plane, whose red-and-white landmark, if things went well, might be located by an airman. Though in fact I staked little expectation on the coming of a rescue party, it seemed our only hope. In any case we had left our last drops of water there, and both of us were desperately thirsty. If we were to survive we must return. We were cooped within an iron circle, the brief autonomy of our thirst.

But it was hard to turn back when, it might be, we were on the way to — life! Perhaps, beyond those mirages, the horizon held inestimable treasures — fields and streams of cool, clear water. Obviously it was wiser to return. Yet, as we made that hateful movement of retreat, I had an intuition of disaster.

We had tramped thirty-six miles in the day. Now we were lying beside the plane. The last drop of liquid was exhausted. Nothing had come of the day’s exploration, and no plane had passed this way. Plow long could we hold out? Already we were suffering terribly from thirst.

We had piled up fragments of the broken wing, had petrol ready and aluminium plates, which burn with a fierce white flame. Now we waited till the darkness was complete before lighting our fire. Would there be anyone to see it? . . .

The flames rose high. In religious silence we watched our beacon lighting up the desert, launching its mute appeal in waves of silver fire. Those flames, I thought, are not only a signal of despair, but a message, too, of human solidarity, of love. We were trying to renew contact with our kind, not merely have them quench our thirst. If only another fire would blaze up in the desert; for only men make fires — let them give answer!

A vision haunted my imagination — of my wife’s eyes under the halo of a wide-brimmed hat. Of her face I could see nothing else; only the eyes, insistent, questioning eyes. And I answered them, answered with all my might, launching my fervor through the darkness like a flame. . . .

I had done my utmost; we both had done our best — thirty-six miles on foot almost without a drop to drink. Now there was no water left. Were we to blame if we could hold out no longer? I suppose we might have gone on sucking the nipples of our water bottles, like wellconducted infants. But the moment I sniffed the bottom of my tin mug, a mechanism ran down inside me. After the final sip I lost foothold. Time, the river, was bearing me away — how could I stem its course? ... I saw a tear on Prévot’s cheek; to hearten him I tapped him on the shoulder, saying: —

‘ Well, old chap, if we ’re in for it, we ’re in for it!’

‘Do you imagine,’ he retorted, ‘that it’s for myself I ’m crying ? ’

Indeed, already I had found out for myself a fundamental axiom: that nothing is unbearable. Next day, and on the following day, I was to test and verify its certitude. I had never quite believed in torture; long ago, reading Poe’s tales of horror, I had doubted its efficacy. On one occasion I had all but drowned in the cabin of my plane, yet I had not suffered much. And when, on other occasions, it had seemed that I was in for it, I had never looked on my extinction as a major tragedy. Now too, it seemed, I should feel little or no distress — a paradox the coming day was to confirm. And I realized that, our balefire notwithstanding, I’d quite given up expecting anyone on earth to heed our SOS.

‘Do you imagine it’s for myself?’

‘Prévot’s right,’ I thought. ‘That’s what’s so damnable about it. Every time those pleading eyes meet mine, it is as if a flame had touched me; I feel an impulse to spring up and rush straight forward. Beyond that dark horizon a ship is sinking; they are launching signals of distress.’

How curious this reversal of the rôles — but I had always suspected it was thus! Still, to make quite certain, I had needed Prévot. Prévot was a levelheaded young man, and he loved life. Yet, no more than I would Prévot, facing death, experience that shrinking horror on which so many writers have expatiated. But there was something neither he nor I could bear to contemplate.

To fall asleep, whether for a night or for eternity — I could face either with an equal mind. Once asleep, how tell the difference? And then . . . what peace is in eternity! But when I thought of what would happen yonder, those cries of desolation mounting like a flame — no, that I could not face. I dared not accept disaster with folded arms. My loved ones were dying by inches, with every second’s silence. A blind rage surged up in me — resentment of the chains withholding us from going to the help of those poor drowning folk. Why could not our beacon flash its message to the ends of earth? ‘Be patient, friends. . . . We are on our way to rescue you! ’

The aluminium had burnt out, the fire was glowing red. Only a pile of embers remained, over which we crouched to warm ourselves. Our luminous appeal had spent itself — what response had it evoked anywhere on earth? Only too well I knew that it had failed, like an unheard prayer, launched into the void and lost. . . .

‘So that’s that,’ I murmured. ‘Let’s turn in now.’

(To be concluded)