With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D.

by Rudyard Kipling

  Rhyl. J. VINCENT MATHEWS.

  [We entirely sympathize with Professor Mathews's views, but unluckilytill the Board sees fit to further regulate the Southern areas in whichscientific experiments may be conducted, we shall always be exposed tothe risk which our correspondent describes. Unfortunately, a chimerabombinating in a vacuum is, nowadays, only too capable of producingsecondary causes.--_Editor_.]

  Answers to Correspondents

  VIGILANS--The Laws of Auroral Derangements are still imperfectlyunderstood. Any overheated motor may of course "seize" without warning;but so many complaints have reached us of accidents similar to yourswhile shooting the Aurora that we are inclined to believe with Lavallethat the upper strata of the Aurora Borealis are practically one bigelectric "leak," and that the paralysis of your engines was due tocomplete magnetization of all metallic parts. Low-flying planes often"glue up" when near the Magnetic Pole, and there is no reason in sciencewhy the same disability should not be experienced at higher levels whenthe Auroras are "delivering" strongly.

  INDIGNANT--On your own showing, you were not under control. That youcould not hoist the necessary N. U. C. lights on approaching atraffic-lane because your electrics had short-circuited is a misfortunewhich might befall any one. The A. B. C., being responsible for theplanet's traffic, cannot, however, make allowance for this kind ofmisfortune. A reference to the Code will show that you were fined on thelower scale.

  PLANISTON--(1) The Five Thousand Kilometre (overland) was won last yearby L. V. Rautsch, R. M. Rautsch, his brother, in the same week pullingoff the Ten Thousand (oversea). R. M.'s average worked out at a fractionover 500 kilometres per hour, thus constituting a record. (2)Theoretically, there is no limit to the lift of a dirigible. Forcommercial and practical purposes 15,000 tons is accepted as the mostmanageable.

  PATERFAMILIAS--None whatever. He is liable for direct damage both toyour chimneys and any collateral damage caused by fall of bricks intogarden, etc., etc. Bodily inconvenience and mental anguish may beincluded, but the average jury are not, as a rule, men of sentiment. Ifyou can prove that his grapnel removed _any_ portion of your roof, youhad better rest your case on decoverture of domicile (See Parkins _v_.Duboulay). We entirely sympathize with your position, but the night ofthe 14th was stormy and confused, and--you may have to anchor on astranger's chimney yourself some night. _Verbum sap!_

  ALDEBARAN--War, as a paying concern, ceased in 1967. (2) The Conventionof London expressly reserves to every nation the right of waging war solong as it does not interfere with the world's traffic. (3) The A. B. C.was constituted in 1949.

  L. M. D.--Keep her dead head-on at half-power, taking advantage of thelulls to speed up and creep into it. She will strain much less this waythan in quartering across a gale. (2) Nothing is to be gained byreversing into a following gale, and there is always risk of aturn-over. (3) The formulae for stun'sle brakes are uniformly unreliable,and will continue to be so as long as air is compressible.

  PEGAMOID--Personally we prefer glass or flux compounds to any othermaterial for winter work nose-caps as being absolutely non-hygroscopic.(2) We cannot recommend any particular make.

  PULMONAR--For the symptoms you describe, try the Gobi Desert Sanitaria.The low levels of the Saharan Sanitaria are against them except at theoutset of the disease. (2) We do not recommend boarding-houses or hotelsin this column.

  BEGINNER--On still days the air above a large inhabited city beingslightly warmer--i. e., thinner--than the atmosphere of the surroundingcountry, a plane drops a little on entering the rarefied area, preciselyas a ship sinks a little in fresh water. Hence the phenomena of "jolt"and your "inexplicable collisions" with factory chimneys. In air, as onearth, it is safest to fly high.

  EMERGENCY--There is only one rule of the road in air, earth, and water.Do you want the firmament to yourself?

  PICCIOLA--Both Poles have been overdone in Art and Literature. Leavethem to Science for the next twenty years. You did not send a stamp withyour verses.

  NORTH NIGERIA--The Mark Boat was within her right in warning you up onthe Reserve. The shadow of a low-flying dirigible scares the game. Youcan buy all the photos you need at Sokoto.

  NEW ERA--It is not etiquette to overcross an A. B. C. official's boatwithout asking permission. He is one of the body responsible for theplanet's traffic, and for that reason must not be interfered with. You,presumably, are out on your own business or pleasure, and should leavehim alone. For humanity's sake don't try to be "democratic."

  REVIEWS

  Reviews

  The Life of Xavier Lavalle

  (_Reviewed by Rene Talland. Ecole Aeronautique, Paris_)

  Ten years ago Lavalle, "that imperturbable dreamer of the heavens," asLazareff hailed him, gathered together the fruits of a lifetime'slabour, and gave it, with well-justified contempt, to a world bound handand foot to Barald's Theory of Vertices and "compensating electricnodes." "They shall see," he wrote--in that immortal postscript to "TheHeart of the Cyclone"--"the Laws whose existence they derided written infire _beneath_ them."

  "But even here," he continues, "there is no finality. Better a thousandtimes my conclusions should be discredited than that my dead name shouldlie across the threshold of the temple of Science--a bar to furtherinquiry."

  So died Lavalle--a prince of the Powers of the Air, and even at hisfuneral Cellier jested at "him who had gone to discover the secrets ofthe Aurora Borealis."

  If I choose thus to be banal, it is only to remind you that Cellier'stheories are to-day as exploded as the ludicrous deductions of theSpanish school. In the place of their fugitive and warring dreams wehave, definitely, Lavalle's Law of the Cyclone which he surprised indarkness and cold at the foot of the overarching throne of the AuroraBorealis. It is there that I, intent on my own investigations, havepassed and re-passed a hundred times the worn leonine face, white as thesnow beneath him, furrowed with wrinkles like the seams and gashes uponthe North Cape; the nervous hand, integrally a part of the mechanism ofhis flighter; and above all, the wonderful lambent eyes turned to thezenith.

  "Master," I would cry as I moved respectfully beneath him, "what is ityou seek to-day?" and always the answer, clear and without doubt, fromabove: "The old secret, my son!"

  The immense egotism of youth forced me on my own path, but (cry of thehuman always!) had I known--if I had known--I would many times havebartered my poor laurels for the privilege, such as Tinsley and Herrerapossess, of having aided him in his monumental researches.

  It is to the filial piety of Victor Lavalle that we owe the two volumesconsecrated to the ground-life of his father, so full of the holyintimacies of the domestic hearth. Once returned from the abysms of theutter North to that little house upon the outskirts of Meudon, it wasnot the philosopher, the daring observer, the man of iron energy thatimposed himself on his family, but a fat and even plaintive jester, afarceur incarnate and kindly, the co-equal of his children, and, it mustbe written, not seldom the comic despair of Madame Lavalle, who, as shewrites five years after the marriage, to her venerable mother, found "inthis unequalled intellect whose name I bear the abandon of a large andvery untidy boy." Here is her letter:

  "Xavier returned from I do not know where at midnight, absorbed incalculations on the eternal question of his Aurora--_la belle Aurore_,whom I begin to hate. Instead of anchoring--I had set out theguide-light above our roof, so he had but to descend and fasten theplane--he wandered, profoundly distracted, above the town with hisanchor down! Figure to yourself, dear mother, it is the roof of themayor's house that the grapnel first engages! That I do not regret, forthe mayor's wife and I are not sympathetic; but when Xavier uproots mypet araucaria and bears it across the garden into the conservatory Iprotest at the top of my voice. Little Victor in his night-clothes runsto the window, enormously amused at the parabolic flight without reason,for it is too dark to see the grapnel, of my prized tree. The Mayor ofMeudon thunders at our door in the name of the Law, demanding, Isuppose, my
husband's head. Here is the conversation through themegaphone--Xavier is two hundred feet above us.

  "'Mons. Lavalle, descend and make reparation for outrage of domicile.Descend, Mons. Lavalle!'

  "No one answers.

  "'Xavier Lavalle, in the name of the Law, descend and submit to processfor outrage of domicile.'

  "Xavier, roused from his calculations, only comprehending the lastwords: 'Outrage of domicile? My dear mayor, who is the man that hascorrupted thy Julie?'

  "The mayor, furious, 'Xavier Lavalle----'

  "Xavier, interrupting: 'I have not that felicity. I am only a dealer incyclones!'

  "My faith, he raised one then! All Meudon attended in the streets, andmy Xavier, after a long time comprehending what he had done, excusedhimself in a thousand apologies. At last the reconciliation was effectedin our house over a supper at two in the morning--Julie in a wonderfulcostume of compromises, and I have her and the mayor pacified in beds inthe blue room."

  And on the next day, while the mayor rebuilds his roof, her Xavierdeparts anew for the Aurora Borealis, there to commence his life'swork. M. Victor Lavalle tells us of that historic collision (_en plane_)on the flank of Hecla between Herrera, then a pillar of the Spanishschool, and the man destined to confute his theories and lead himintellectually captive. Even through the years, the immense laugh ofLavalle as he sustains the Spaniard's wrecked plane, and cries:"Courage! _I_ shall not fall till I have found Truth, and I hold _you_fast!" rings like the call of trumpets. This is that Lavalle whom theworld, immersed in speculations of immediate gain, did not know norsuspect--the Lavalle whom they adjudged to the last a pedant and atheorist.

  The human, as apart from the scientific, side (developed in his ownvolumes) of his epoch-making discoveries is marked with a simplicity,clarity, and good sense beyond praise. I would specially refer such asdoubt the sustaining influence of ancestral faith upon character andwill to the eleventh and nineteenth chapters, in which are contained theopening and consummation of the Tellurionical Records extending overnine years. Of their tremendous significance be sure that the modesthouse at Meudon knew as little as that the Records would one day be theworld's standard in all official meteorology. It was enough for themthat their Xavier--this son, this father, this husband--ascendedperiodically to commune with powers, it might be angelic, beyond theircomprehension, and that they united daily in prayers for his safety.

  "Pray for me," he says upon the eve of each of his excursions, andreturning, with an equal simplicity, he renders thanks "after supper inthe little room where he kept his barometers."

  To the last Lavalle was a Catholic of the old school, accepting--he whohad looked into the very heart of the lightnings--the dogmas of papalinfallibility, of absolution, of confession--of relics great and small.Marvellous--enviable contradiction!

  The completion of the Tellurionical Records closed what Lavalle himselfwas pleased to call the theoretical side of his labours--labours fromwhich the youngest and least impressionable planeur might well haveshrunk. He had traced through cold and heat, across the deeps of theoceans, with instruments of his own invention, over the inhospitableheart of the polar ice and the sterile visage of the deserts, league byleague, patiently, unweariedly, remorselessly, from their ever-shiftingcradle under the magnetic pole to their exalted death-bed in the utmostether of the upper atmosphere--each one of the IsoconicalTellurions--Lavalle's Curves, as we call them to-day. He haddisentangled the nodes of their intersections, assigning to each itsregulated period of flux and reflux. Thus equipped, he summons Herreraand Tinsley, his pupils, to the final demonstration as calmly as thoughhe were ordering his flighter for some midday journey to Marseilles.

  "I have proved my thesis," he writes. "It remains now only that youshould witness the proof. We go to Manila to-morrow. A cyclone will formoff the Pescadores S. 17 E. in four days, and will reach its maximumintensity in twenty-seven hours after inception. It is there I will showyou the Truth."

  A letter heretofore unpublished from Herrera to Madame Lavalle tells ushow the Master's prophecy was verified.

  (_To be continued_.)

  ADVERTISING SECTION

  MISCELLANEOUS

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  For sale--A bargain--Single Plane, narrow-gauge vans, Pinke motor.Restayed this autumn. Hansen air-kit. 38 in. chest, 15-1/2 collar. Canbe seen by appointment.

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  =The Bee-Line Bookshop=

  BELT'S WAY-BOOKS, giving town lights for all towns over 4,000 pop. aslaid down by A. B. C.

  THE WORLD. Complete 2 vols. Thin Oxford, limp back. 12s. 6d.

  BELT'S COASTAL ITINERARY. Shore Lights of the World. 7s. 6d.

  THE TRANSATLANTIC AND MEDITERRANEAN TRAFFIC LINES. (By authority of theA. B. C.) Paper, 1s. 6d.; cloth, 2s. 6d. Ready Jan. 15.

  ARCTIC AEROPLANING. Siemens and Galt. Cloth, bds. 3s. 6d.

  LAVALLE'S HEART OF THE CYCLONE, with supplementary charts. 4s. 6d.

  RIMINGTON'S PITFALLS IN THE AIR, and Table of Comparative Densities. 3s.6d.

  ANGELO'S DESERT IN A DIRIGIBLE. New edition, revised. 5s. 9d.

  VAUGHAN'S PLANE RACING IN CALM AND STORM. 2s. 6d.

  VAUGHAN'S HINTS TO THE AIR-MATEUR. 1s.

  HOFMAN'S LAWS OF LIFT AND VELOCITY. With diagrams, 3s. 6d.

  DE VITRE'S THEORY OF SHIFTING BALLAST IN DIRIGIBLES. 2s. 6d.

  SANGER'S WEATHERS OF THE WORLD. 4s.

  SANGER'S TEMPERATURES AT HIGH ALTITUDES. 4s.

  HAWKIN'S FOG AND HOW TO AVOID IT. 3s.

  VAN ZUYLAN'S SECONDARY EFFECTS OF THUNDERSTORMS. 4s. 6d.

  DAHLGREN'S AIR CURRENTS AND EPIDEMIC DISEASES. 5s. 6d.

  REDMAYNE'S DISEASE AND THE BAROMETER. 7s. 6d.

  WALTON'S HEALTH RESORTS OF THE GOBI AND SHAMO. 3s. 6d.

  WALTON'S THE POLE AND PULMONARY COMPLAINTS. 7s. 6d.

  MUTLOW'S HIGH LEVEL BACTERIOLOGY 7s. 6d.

  HALLIWELL'S ILLUMINATED STAR MAP, with clockwork attachment, givingapparent motion of heavens, boxed, complete with clamps for binnacle. 36inch size, only L2. 2. 0. (Invaluable for night work.) With A. B. C.certificate, L3. 10s. 0d.

  Zalinski's Standard Works.

  PASSES OF THE HIMALAYAS. 5s.

  PASSES OF THE SIERRAS. 5s.

  PASSES OF THE ROCKIES. 5s.

  PASSES OF THE URALS. 5s.

  The four boxed, limp cloth, with charts, 15s.

  GRAY'S AIR CURRENTS IN MOUNTAIN GORGES. 7s. 6d.

  =A. C. BELT & SON, READING=

  SAFETY WEAR FOR AERONAUTS

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  =Hansen's Flickers Lead the Aerial Flight= =197 Oxford Street=