Part 14
All the world about him was astir now and eager for the day. Hatless men had emerged from the Palace Hotel, and were darting hither and thither on skis, or crying the news to girls hidden at their bedroom windows. Caterers for an expected multitude flocked towards the booths they had erected on the mountain-side, and prepared to set out their wares. A perpetual going and coming, the jangling of sleigh bells and the neighing of horses spoke of unusual activity at the stables.
Higher up on the slope whence the actual start was to be made, a little throng had already gathered. It surveyed the ground, and looked wonderingly toward distant Mont Blanc veiled in the mists. Was it possible that this mad Englishman would attempt to fly as far as that? Incredible! A thing undreamed of--perhaps an affront to the Almighty, who had created the mountains to speak of His power and dominion.
Benny saw these people as he wheeled his aeroplane out of the shed at eight o'clock, and began to push it up toward the plateau. He thought very little of them, and remembered few of his friends at Andana. A certain pleasure at the interest he had awakened was mingled already with the desire to hear if Lily Delayne would be present at the start. He knew not quite why it was, but his desire that she should be there became rather a superstition than a sentiment. He blamed her no longer for the indifference she had displayed during the week, for that was natural to the circumstance; but he associated her presence with the success of his attempt, and was almost ready to say that it would not succeed if she failed him.
Of Lily, however, there was no sign at present. He had to be content with the gossip of Bess Bethune, who was early on the scene, and ready with a thousand questions. Bess promised to tell her uncle, the Cabinet Minister, all about the wonderful machine; and, as she said, "Of course, the Government will buy thousands, especially if you don't do it, because Governments always buy things which fall down." When this offer failed to excite the stolid engineer as much as it might have done, she turned to Dr. Orange, and asked him if he were not going to lend Mr. Benson his surgical instruments? Her chatter was not unmusical, and her presence welcome amid the gloom which now fell upon the company. Perhaps many shared the child's fears. This Englishman was going to his death--there could hardly be a doubt about it.
Benny moved in and out among the people, exchanging a word here, bestowing a nod there. He was wrapped up like an Arctic explorer, and resembled a shaggy bear more than a man; but his black eyes were very bright, and his pale cheeks carried a flush of colour foreign to them. Chiefly, perhaps, his attention centred upon the narrow path by which Lily Delayne must come up from her chalet, if she came at all; and he searched it at brief intervals, even pushing his way through the press of the people that he might inspect it more surely, but always to his disappointment. Of Lily herself there was not a sign, the very blinds of her sitting-room were drawn down. He fell to wondering if she had left Andana altogether, and he might have rested upon his opinion but for a message brought to him from the chalet just five minutes before the signal to start was given. This was nothing less than a little horse-shoe carved out of wood and set with silver nails. To it was attached a card with the simple words, "Good Luck," and then the initials, "L. C." Benny resolved immediately to make it his "mascot," and he affixed it to the prow of his machine without a word to anyone.
Such an offering at the altar of superstition set other friends busy, and mascots were offered by many hands. Teddy-bears, brought in haste from the bazaar, squatted upon the aluminium shell of the aeroplane; pigs and elephants from the same merchant were tied by willing hands wherever a lodgment could be found. The occupation found the company in better mood, and as the moment drew near many who had been silent became eloquent enough and forgot their apprehensions. It was almost with impatience that the people heard the long-winded speech of the president for the day. Words would not help Benjamin Benson across the Pennine Alps, they remembered, and some of them did not hesitate to say so aloud. Fortunately, the address came to an end just when the patience of the malcontents was quite exhausted; and then, with a last salute and a word of good cheer to Brother Jack and the Abbe, Benny climbed to his seat and roared to them to let go.
In a sense, it was an undramatic start, and pleased the excitable Frenchmen but little. Their tastes would have dictated a flourish of trumpets or a salute of twenty-one guns; whereas, in fact, there was no music whatever at this particular moment, and the solitary gun which denoted the start boomed heavily and almost with menace. Its echoes had hardly died away in the heights above Vermala when the roar of Benny's engine was to be heard, and immediately upon that the machine, flashing silver in the sunshine, soared above the plateau, and was gone in an instant straight across the mighty chasm of the Rhone Valley. Five minutes later the same machine was but a speck against the azure of the sky.
Benny had made a good ascent, and was pleased enough with the way his engine ran. The exhaust was firm and regular; he knew the firing to be even; while, as for the lifting power, he was off the ground in twenty yards and had mounted five hundred feet the very first time he circled above the spectators. This gave him confidence, and sent him straight across the valley without further preliminary. To be sure, he cast down one quick glance at the black ring of spectators upon the plateau before the Palace Hotel, searched out for an instant Lily's chalet and tried to believe that the figure in the garden was that of a woman who had inspired him to this day's work; but his reward was a vague impression of a blurred scene, and it gave place almost immediately to the wonder and ecstasy of the flight itself, and to that desire of a goal which burned him as a fever.
His course lay almost directly to the southwest. Upon his left hand were the tremendous precipices of the Janus-faced Weisshorn, the gentler arrete of the Rothhorn, and, behind that again, the black rocks of the Matterhorn. More directly before him were the Becs de Bossons, and the black defile of the lower Valley; while the Aiguilles Rouges, clear and sharp, stood to his right at the moment of departure. Heading for a while down the Valley of the Rhone, he saw the range of the Pennine Alps opening away to the south to disclose Mont Blanc and the triple domes, now lightly veiled by cloud, but plainly to be discerned at the altitude he had chosen. Here Nature seemed a little kinder, showing him low, rounded mountains upon either side of the valley and great woods of the pines which were but black scars upon the sheer rock. Deeper down lay the heart of the chasm, the towns, which were but so many dots upon a sepia ground, the silver thread of the Rhone itself, and Sion with its puny heights whereon proud bishops had built their palaces. Over these he passed at a tremendous speed, watched from below by thousands who were invisible to him. He felt already that he was the master even of this majesty--that man had conquered, and to him henceforth must be the dominion.
The day had broken fine, and the sun shone gloriously when he crossed the actual valley and began to fly high above the mountains upon the other side. Warned that height would be his salvation, he now soared to a great altitude that he might be sure of stable currents and not be drawn down by any of those eddies in which aeroplanes founder so quickly. Of the latter he had a momentary experience at the mouth of the Black Valley, where the cross winds caught him and turned him completely about before he could recover control, so that he was facing Brigue again and looking toward Italy and not toward France. This salutary warning found him more watchful afterwards; and when he had put the machine straight he mounted still higher, and found a dead calm, wherein he ignored the bitter cold and quickly left the valley behind him.
Now for the first time Lake Leman was visible to the northwest. He could see its waters shining in the sun and thought he could locate the heights of Caux; but of this he was not sure, and his knowledge of the Alps being very limited, he but guessed at his precise environment. Of Mont Blanc, however, he never lost a clear vision, and heading his ship for that, had eyes for little else.
There were glaciers shaping at this point of the journey, and the sun showed him desolate fields of snow slashed with the jagged bands of ice and often cut by the black rocks of some fearsome arrete. The loneliness of his situation was emphasised by this vision of a world apart; of ravines which the foot of man had never trodden; of heights which the foot of man had never conquered. Descending a little, he searched out the dark places with curious eyes, tried to make villages of the tracery below him; said that the zig-zags stood for vines upon the hillside and the black lines for railways. When he heard quite distinctly the whistle of a locomotive upon its way to Martigny, the message appeared to come out of the unknown, a voice from a house of his dreams. It recalled him to a sense of his own situation, to the possibilities of failure and of death. He remembered that he was very cold, and wondered if he would have the physical strength to continue.
It was an unhappy foreboding, and he shook it off as well as he could and tried to remember the speed at which he was flying and the hour at which it would bring him to the Valley of Chamonix. The mighty shape of Mont Blanc had begun to emerge more plainly from the mists at this time, and to show its sloping summit, with the attendant needles very distinctly to be seen. He knew that he must pass right across the great mountain, and then find what landing he could in the valley, and the desire to do this with credit put other thoughts from his head. The Val d'Hauderes was behind him at this time, and the head of his ship pointed almost directly to the Aiguilles Rouges, beyond which lay the Valley of Chamonix. When he looked at the chronometer, fixed upon the right-hand side of the frame, he learned that he had already been flying for one hour and twenty minutes; but of his actual direction he could glean nothing by the compass, which swung to every point as the ship sagged and recovered in the varying currents. This mattered little while the weather remained clear; and when, almost with the swiftness of a vision, the valley came into view he believed his object to be already attained.
What a glorious revelation was that--the revelation of countless spires and needles of rock, all dwarfed by his altitude, and seeming but a magic forest rising from the eternal snows. Had he been a mountaineer, he would have named many of them, and before all others the Aiguille du Geant, with its numberless satellites. But he had no knowledge of the valley, and all his interest centred upon Mont Blanc. Viewed at such a height, the mighty monarch appeared rather a great mound of snow above diverging rivers of ice than the proud mountain of the school-day fables; but such was the truth; and when he looked down upon the grand plateau, that spreading field of snow where so many have perished, it reminded him of nothing so much as the plateau at Andana, where his friends awaited him. Benny thought of them with a smile as he headed the ship right over the mountain. It seemed impossible to believe that he had left them just an hour and a half ago.
He flew very close to the summit of Mont Blanc and dropped upon it three 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.