weighted bags, each containing his message to the Aero Club of
Switzerland. A sense of humour reminded him that those bags would hardly
be sought by any climber at this season of the year, and that their very
fabric might be rotted when the great thaw came; but he liked the idea
of a message, and would scatter others before the flight was done. When
they were delivered, he wheeled his machine right-about, and espying the
white buildings of the valley, he began to go down toward them. Now, for
the first time that day, he could realise the immensity of the
precipices he had defied and their danger. Vast walls of rock appeared
to engulf him as he descended; he could feel a bitter cold wind rising
up from the monster glaciers which had become lakes of the clearest blue
ice; pine-woods shaped and declared the contours of trees. He became
aware of the presence of people in the valley--thousands of them, moving
in great throngs, now this way, now that, as they attempted to follow
his movements. In the end he heard a roar of voices swelling upward,
and this magnified in notes of a falsetto often ridiculous, but
unmistakable. Called as by a messenger, he sought out a landing-place,
and his eyes searched the snow-fields ceaselessly. Where was Emile--the
faithful Emile? Ah, he stood yonder where the flags were waving. And
thither the willing machine swept downward, gliding at last with wings
outstretched and touching the snow as caressingly as a young girl may
kiss her lover.
The chosen ground was about a mile from the village itself, near Les
Pres, on the banks of the Arve. Here a fine spread of snow made descent
comparatively safe, and here Benny found his allies, those clever
workmen from the French shops whom he had engaged especially for his
venture. Immediately they swarmed about him, driving the strangers back
and appealing to the breathless gendarmes. As for little Emile, he
threw himself into the Englishman's arms and kissed him on both cheeks,
which resounding thwacks would not have disgraced a pantomime. He was
followed by normally sane members of the Aero Clubs of France and
London, who, forgetting their sanity, capered like goats upon the
mountain, and uttered incoherent witticisms in unknown tongues. Behind
them lay the spectators whose "bravos" echoed far up in the
mountains--the honest acclamations of those who had seen miracles and
would never forget the day. Indeed, it was said that some of the
peasants had fled to the churches when the aeroplane first appeared over
Mont Blanc. The priests themselves, taught to know better by the Abbe
Villari, sent them forth with ridicule. Was there not a lunch to be
eaten? And why should they delay?
Benny was frozen to the marrow when he rolled out of the shell, and his
first request was for a hot drink. When Monsieur Collot of the Swiss
Club shrugged his shoulders in pitiful desperation, Benny mumbled
something about a Thermos under the driving seat, and Emile
understanding, the flask was brought out and the hot draught proffered.
Then the bluff engineer, striding to and fro upon the snow, tried to
answer all their questions at a breath, while a photographer from the
_Daily Recorder_ made frantic efforts to snapshot him, and almost cried
when he could not.
Yes, Benny admitted it had been a great day. He found the air currents
very sure, but had suffered a good deal from the scorching sun. There
would be no skin on his face for a month, but that did not matter. He
could hardly tell them how the big mountains looked from above--his eyes
had been too much on his engine; but he thought very little of Mont
Blanc as a show when seen up aloft, and he was astonished how flat a
country an aeroplane could make even of this Switzerland. As to his
prospects, he would finish if the engine held out and the cold was not
too much for him. He had his doubts on the latter score, not upon the
former. Pressed to say if his sensations had not been quite abnormal,
he admitted that they might have been, and that he had known moments of
fear, especially when he came down into the valley. The ether, he said,
was a good friend to man when it was warm enough. He quite understood
why parsons told them to look upward, for there was nothing like the
peace of the heights in all the human story. But for the danger, no man
who had known what it was to fly would ever wish to get back to the
earth again. Sometimes at great heights he thought he had lost the
earth altogether, and might drift away to another planet--which our
great great grandchildren may be doing, he added, with a laugh. This
Valley of Chamonix was just like a prison for the time being; he felt
cabined and confined, wanted to be off and into the blue again; but he
would take some food first if they didn't mind, and he hoped the police
would keep all hands off his machine. To which Emile responded that he
would shoot anyone who touched it, and with this amiable sentiment,
continued his feverish task of replenishment and overhaul.
Benny, meanwhile, was led away to the Hotel Londres, where a luncheon
had been prepared. His appearance, when he had discarded his furs, was
droll enough; and, surely, this was the first time that high officials
of Switzerland had sat down to banquet a man in engineer's overalls!
But they did so with pride, and the speech in which the Mayor of
Lausanne proposed the aviator's health did credit alike to his
discernment and to his generosity.
It was nearly mid-day when the meal was done, and a quarter-past twelve
when Benny pushed his way through the crowds of people and took his seat
once more at the tiller of his ship. A hot sun then blazed in the sky,
but a murmur of winds stirred ever and anon in the valley and warned him
that the Rubicon had yet to be crossed. There would be dangerous
moments above the Zermatt glaciers, and still graver dangers when he
re-entered the Simplon. But he was in better heart to face them, and
with a few honest words to the people he arose swiftly, amid a storm of
wild cheering, straight up above the River Arve to the west, and the
goal.
*CHAPTER XXI*
*THE FLIGHT IS FINISHED*
There is no more impressive fact of aviation than the speed at which the
airman loses touch with _terra firma_.
At one moment the subject of congratulations amid a press of people, a
familiar landscape about him, hills for his horizon, a great plain for
his environment; at the next, he is high above the earth, the familiar
landmarks are almost blotted out, the people have disappeared from his
sight.
Benny had shaken hands perhaps with five hundred worthy souls at
Chamonix, had written his name in fifty books, posed for his picture to
excited acrobats who held quaking cameras, addressed blunt little
speeches to the deputies, quaffed a stirrup-cup of hot spiced wine, been
conscious of an environment of mighty mountains and majestic peaks, and
then, in a flash, the picture was changed, the people had disappeared,
the voices were lost to him, the very scene transformed.
He rose a little to the north of the forbidding Aiguille du Geant and
experienced just for an instant the sensation that he had not attained a
sufficient altitude and must strike the dread pinnacles of the rock.
This was an unnecessary alarm, for the ship responded quickly to a touch
of the elevating plane, and he cleared the mountain by three hundred
feet or more. Then he headed almost due east, as he had been told to do.
The wind, capricious ever in the Valley of Chamonix, here became almost
boisterous; and for the first time that day he discovered a vacuum, as
it were a whirlpool of the ether, into which he was drawn, and for a few
moments whirled about with a velocity which appalled him. One less
skilful might have wrecked all at such a moment, and had it been so he
would have gone down headlong amid the pinnacles of rock which stand
attendant to the famous peak. Benny, however, was always prepared for
such a happening as this, and despite that crude sensation of the swift
descent he covered his balance almost immediately and put the ship due
east again.
He had saved himself, but for how long? The dread mountains, above
which he must sail henceforth, would be fertile in such perils as this;
the valleys he must cross would be death-traps to any but the most
vigilant. Pride in his swift flight to Mont Blanc had seduced him to
this easy confidence, which might undo all if uncorrected. He resolved
to apply all the mental concentration of which he was capable to the one
purpose of success, and taking the wheel firmly in his hands, he set his
eyes toward the great mountains about Zermatt and would heed no other
spectacle.
It has been said that he was quite ignorant of the Alps, and, truly, a
man more familiar with the scene would have better understood the wonder
of the deed.
Here below him were the steeps and slopes, the dread arretes, the
gleaming precipices which climbers had dared since Switzerland first
called them to her wonders. Observed from that immense altitude he had
now attained, the precipices had become but slabs of snow, steps in a
puny wall above which the pinnacles soared; the steeps were but mild
hills whereon children should have played; the glaciers but silver
threads in whitened moraines which pierced the woods. Hotels and
huts--he could hardly distinguish one from the other; the valleys were
flattened out until they resembled the plateaus, and all with such a
grotesque effect that sometimes the very earth would appear to be turned
inside out as it were, the valleys made heights and the heights pressed
down to valleys. Going on a little way, a cloud would shut the whole
scene from his view, and he would imagine himself in the boundless
ether, a wanderer apart from all worlds and voyaging toward the Eternal.
Engineers seldom lack imagination, and he of them all had a soul above
the mechanics of things material. Despite his desire to accomplish the
task he had set himself, this phantasy of the cloud inspired him to
wonderful thoughts of life and death and the transit of the soul. Let
this new science of flight continue, and who could name its limitations?
He laughed at the folly of the notion, and then remembered that he must
breast Zermatt according to the conditions.
Had he lost count of the Matterhorn? He peered down anxiously through
the mist, descended a little and received the first real fright since
the beginning. For a mountain loomed suddenly before him; he swung
instantly to the left, and was then almost abreast of a fearsome
precipice which suggested the whole measure of that height. The terror
of it set him shuddering. He soared again desperately, and listened to
the beat of his engine as to a message of life or death. Would it fail
him? If it did, death must be the end of it. He laughed at his own
cowardice when the rattle of the exhaust made music for his ears again,
and the drifting vapour showed him all the wonders of the Riffelberg, as
no living man but he had seen it.
Here for the first time he could look down upon the smiling face of
Italy, and discern the gentler country between the chain of the Pennines
and Biella. Despite the altitude, a warmer breath was breathed upon him
from the southern valleys. The vast bulk of Monte Rosa, approached as
he swung about to regain the Simplon, warned him that the respite was
but brief, and that all the rigour of the northern range must be faced
anew if he would reach Andana. But he was cheered by this break in the
vista of eternal snows; and bringing his machine about, he searched the
wilderness of ice below for any sign of those who must observe his
passing.
He had crossed the sloping peak of the Matterhorn by this time, and
could espy the precipices of the Weisshorn once more. The Valley of
Zermatt running down to the pass was but a trench in a desolation from
which the eyes must shrink. Knowing little of the place, he had few
landmarks; but the Gorner Glacier was one of them, and he traced it with
precision. There he perceived great tendrils of pure ice, bent and
gnarled as the trunks of trees; black rocks upon which no snow could
rest; fathomless depths of ice so blue that a magic river should lie
beneath them. And there, as elsewhere, the stillness appalled him. He
was glad that it was so, for wind was the enemy. Let the weather
change, and he might still be defeated. He knew it, and his heart sank
at the remembrance.
A great endeavour is chiefly a story of great hopes. This man had
dreamed of such an opportunity as this--he knew not in what phase of his
calling--but he had dreamed that some day the world would hail him as a
victor, and that his name would be known to men. Now it seemed that the
moment was at hand. The immensity of his achievement was hardly present
to his mind. Sometimes he was almost afraid for himself, saying, "I am
jesting with my fellow-men; it is the machine and not the man which
counts in the story of the sciences." At other times a great pride in
what he had done ran like fire through his veins. The whole world must
know his name to-morrow. If he fell dead then and there upon the black
rocks of the Matterhorn, they must still say that he of all living men
had first crossed the summit of Mont Blanc. He knew it, and flushed at
the knowledge. He had not lived in vain; perchance, should the supreme
prize be his, he was about to enter upon a new life whose rewards he
would not dwell upon. Others had told him so; he was content to believe
them.
And so great hopes went with him, and the smallest check upon them could
set his heart beating. Of these the most considerable came at the
moment when he headed his machine for the twin-peaked Weisshorn. His
brother and the abbe had warned him against the currents of the Valley
of Zermatt; but so triumphant had been his progression to this time that
he had forgotten the warnings or derided them. Now they returned as an
echo to which he must listen. Suddenly, and without any warning at all,
he felt himself sinking toward the valley. It was just as though the
whole machine dropped rapidly, had lost stability, and would go hurtling
down to the abyss as a bird that is shot. In vain he raised his
elevating plane to its full capacity. The shell continued its headlong
flight, its nose dipped downwards, its engine raced wildly. Then, as
suddenly, he regained his balance, went a little way upon an even keel,
and discovered that his engine had almost ceased to run. It ebbed away
as a life that gasps for air--sobbed out a requiem. And that drove him
almost mad with terror; for a spell his wit failed him altogether; he
sat back in his chair and looked death in the face.
But it was for an instant, no more. There is this in the instinct of a
true mechanic, that whatever the emergency, his mind will grasp the
meaning of it before the minds of others, and he will be the first to
act. Even as death looked him in the face, Benny could say that the
engine had ceased to run because the petrol supply had failed. Turning
in his seat he lifted the needles valve, and then struck the side of his
tank a fierce blow. As swiftly as the engine had failed, as swiftly it
took up the drive again. He heard the hum of it; watched the great
propeller racing, and then looked ahead of him to regain his course.
There had been a margin of ten seconds perhaps between salvation and the
ultimate calamity. He was as white as the snow beneath him when he
understood the truth.
A vast black precipice of rock loomed up the third of a mile away.
Unable to see more than its jagged face, Benny swung his machine to
port, then soared without a break until he had lost all sense of
locality, and the air was so bitterly cold that his very breath turned
to ice. Now a great white cloud enveloped him. He looked vainly to his
compass for help, but the needle oscillated so violently that north and
south had no meaning. Descending a little way, he discovered that he
was circling about Monte Rosa, and that the plains of Italy called him
once more. Then despair seized upon him--the despair of a man who
wanders by night, lost to all sense of direction, and vainly seeking
lights upon a strange horizon.
In a measure this dread had been inspired by the fall. He waited with
ear intent for any sound that the engine would fail a second time, and
shuddered at any variation of its rhythm. When the vista became clear
again he was astonished to find that the scene was just as it had been
when first he crossed the summit of the Matterhorn. All the great
peaks--the Dent Blanche, the Rothhorn, the Grand Gorner, the
Weissthor--stood in the same relation to his course as when he had set
it at the beginning. And at this he took new courage, and with a
counsel of prudence which sent him eastward across the mouth of the
valley. He would not enter that trap for the second time; he knew that
in altitude lay his salvation.
His flight now lay in some part along the Italian frontier. He skirted
Monte Rosa and flew straight across the Gorner Grat, kept to the right
of the Horner, and henceforth found a kindlier country. Had he
persisted he would have come to the lesser peaks which fend the Simplon
Pass; but he swung again before he reached them, and so, with the wind
at his back, he headed at last straight for Andana and the goal. Half
an hour, he thought, would bring the end, if the weather held and the
mists were but local.
The latter was now his only doubt, and he could not shake it off despite
the magnitude of his attainment. He had reached a point where he should
have been able to look right up the Valley of the Rhone; but the view
was obscured by those banks of white cloud which had drifted in the
valley since dawn, and were still to be reckoned with. He entered the
first of them, and was subject once more to all the dread and despair
which had afflicted him at Zermatt. A sense of direction was lost as
heretofore; vast shadows appeared to pursue him; he raced his engine
that he might escape them, but they pressed on the more. Then, in an
instant, the way would be clear, the sun shining brightly, the valley
below him a smiling scene to summon him to victory.
It was but such a little way, and victory stood so near. When the cloud
enveloped him for the third time that day, he tried to soar above it,
and succeeded for a little while; but the vapour was mounting also and
it would interpose a curtain between him and the earth, so that
direction was alternately lost and found, while he himself became soaked
to the skin and began to lose the use of his hands. Now, surely, he
thought that he was done for; but still he headed for Andana and the
slopes, and said that all must be risked in that final descent.
Henceforth, it was a race between the endurance of the man and the
machine, and the magnitude of the cloud. He heard an ominous misfire in
his engine, and shivered as though a cold hand had touched him. The
great white sea of vapour below forbade him to see whether he were then
above Visp or Sierre; nor did the contour of the valley shape as he had
expected. So a woful sense of defeat took possession of him anew; his
numbed hands permitted the ship to rock horribly; he went down a hundred
feet, but feared the walls of the valley; rose again, and reeled in his
seat. He was a beaten man by now, hardly able to raise a hand to a
lever; the great white sea had done for him, and he knew it.
Here irony stepped in, and with a weird interposition which would have
delighted a cynic. While his machine rolled and sagged in the mists a
sound of human voices came up to him from below. He thought that he
heard cheers, the hooting of horns, and the crack of a revolver shot.
As swiftly as the sounds arose they died away, and the stillness became
supreme. He felt that he must come down whatever the cost. The great
prize was lost, and with it the hope of the years. And at this tears of
a bitter sorrow welled to the man's eyes. Defeated! Yes, that was the
truth, and the world would know the story to-morrow, and forget him in a
week. What mattered it that he had done so much? Was not victory his
all in all? And he was beat--dead beat--by the cloud which mocked him.
Almost with a sob he made a last effort and began to come down. The
ground below him, emerging suddenly, showed a steep bank of snow with
pinewoods above it. There he ran his ship, and as she came to rest he
buried his face in his hands and wept aloud.
*CHAPTER XXII*
*THE EMPTY HOUSE*
The fit of weakness passed swiftly to give place to a finer measure of
courage than any which had inspired him hitherto.
The prize was lost. What then? He had been robbed of it, not by any
failure of the machine he had created, but by the caprice of nature,
against which he was powerless. Those who criticised him would be
compelled to admit as much. And, all said and done, he had been the
first man to cross Mont Blanc in an aeroplane, and no tongue could rob
him of the credit.
These were early impressions, and not a little vague. He was bitterly
cold and so cramped in every limb that when he rolled out of his seat at
last he could not stand upright. Utterly exhausted in mind and body, he
held as well as he could to the shell of the ship, and tried to drag
himself to his feet. Then he remembered that there was a flask of
brandy among his "stores," and finding it with maladroit hand, he took a
heavy draught. The potent liquor revived him immediately. Circulation
came back at last. He stood upright and looked about him.
He was on a steep slope of the snow, and there were woods above him.
When he had searched them a little while with patient eyes, he began to
think that they were not unfamiliar. A further scrutiny showed him a
gabled building above the woods, and he could have sworn that it was the
well-known hotel at Vermala. Turning to the valley below, he perceived
a clump of pines emerging from the mists, and they fitted into the
picture he had imagined. Yes, they would be the woods standing between
Vermala and the plateau of Andana, and if they were, his chalet lay
below them. But at that thought he shrugged his shoulders and laughed
in an odd way. He would not think about a chance so preposterous.
His machine had escaped all damage in the swift descent, and lay across
the bank; one wing just tipping the froth of the snow, the other poised
high above the white ground. His difficulty was to reach solid ground,
for the drifts were deep hereabouts, and he sank up to his knees at
every step he took. It occurred to him that he must carry skis with him
in future against such a mishap as this; and resolving to make a note of
it, he began to examine the engine and propellers to see if all were
well with them. This scrutiny still occupied him when he heard a loud
shouting from the woods below, and picked up his ears as a hare that is
warned.
There were cries in the wood, incoherent salvos as of a mob whose hearts
might be in unison, but whose lungs were out of tune. Listening
intently, Benny thought that he could distinguish the raucous voices of
boys, the shrill piping of girls, and the deep baying of men excited
abnormally. A moment later and a man emerged from the wood, and set out
to cross the snow toward him, and this man was up to his waist in the
drift immediately, while strong arms were thrust out to help him, and a
roar of laughter proffered as his reward.
"Good God!" cried Benny, "it's the little priest!" And, in truth, it
was.
The Abbe Villari, with his cassock tucked up to his waist, his arms
waving wildly, hatless and with tousled hair, he had been first before
them all. No runner at Stamford Bridge could have had much the better
of him in that mad striving for the first prize in the race. And,
worthy soul, the snow engulfed him immediately, and it remained for the
parson, Harry Clavering, to drag him out and set him, sobered, upon his
feet. Meanwhile, others had snatched the prize from him, and before
them all the Admirable Crichton of Andana, Dr. Orange, the immaculate.
Benny steadied himself by the shell of his ship while he watched this
advance; nor could his wit make anything of it. Why were all these
people in such a hurry to thrash a dead horse? Had they come to tell
what he knew so well, that his endeavour had failed, and that the prize
must go to another? He could make nothing of it, and he stood and
stared while men and women on skis debouched from the woods by twenty
paths and came racing over the snow toward him.
Dr. Orange was quite out of breath when he reached the place, and he
stood for a little while holding to the ship and trying to find words.
Before he had recovered, Bob Otway, Dick Fenton, and Keith Rivers had
joined him, and these were eloquent enough, though they spoke a strange
tongue to Benny. In truth, their greeting was an incoherent salvo of
wild words among which he distinguished such homely phrases as, "You've
got them stiff"; "Bravo old Benny!" and "Perinder pays, by thunder!" An
instant later and Bob had suggested that it was a case for "chairing";
and there being no chair handy, he and Rivers laid violent hands upon
the astonished victor and lifted him bodily to their shoulders.