by Max Hennessy
The storm had fallen away to the north now, a retreating army defeated in battle, and patches of cumulus, great dragging covered waggons of white and purple, lofted upwards almost beyond sight. On the ground, now as they pressed further north, with the sun obscured by a high layer of thin grey-yellow cloud, they could see flecks of white against the walls, the last of the winter snow, still clinging to the exposed places where the bite of the wind riveted them to the earth away from the sun. To the north-west there was a woolly patch of fog reaching out into their path, and, checking the magnetos instinctively, Ira glanced about him, looking for landmarks against which they could check their course.
Small fishing settlements passed beneath their port wing, huddling under the rocks and sheltered by the trees, the ships lying in rows along the docks. Inland they could see small farms and even the neat rows of orchards.
‘Chedabucto Bay coming up,’ Alix said, reading his thoughts. ‘Sydney ahead on your left.’
Ira nodded and turned his attention to the fog again, but it proved to be nothing more than a long wide island of haze, clinging to the coast. Beyond it, they could see the sun glancing obliquely through the clouds to strike the sea in patches of unexpected colour and, as they cleared Chedabucto Bay, the light was reflected by the roofs of Sydney, wedged in among the narrow northern inlets at the very tip of the land, the last fragment they would see for some time until they struck Newfoundland. Picking out the chain of hills stretching from east to west to Cape Chignecto and – beyond the steely strip of Lake Ainslie – the steep turrets of Ingonish surrounded by patches of cloud, Ira made a quick calculation.
‘Five degrees,’ he said. ‘Is the liquid compass out, too, Alix? Is that what you make it?’
She was silent for a while as she made small hurried calculations. ‘That’s it exactly,’ she said.
Fortunately, the air about them was devoid of clouds and squalls, and they checked their position without difficulty. The ground was quilted here and there with snow now, though its streams and lakes reflected the blue clearness of the sky against the darkness of the earth.
Already they had slipped off course, and as Ira gave a new reading they angled back towards the route they sought. So far, they’d been fortunate enough to have had clear weather to make their checks, but during the night ahead of them or if they ran into fog or heavy cloud they’d have no knowledge of how much their compasses varied. They were having trouble in no other direction, however, and the engine beat out its song without hesitation. They readjusted the earth inductor confidently.
‘Tanks, Alix?’
‘Right-wing tank. We’ve got rid of a lot of that overload from the rear tank now. How’s she flying?’
‘Fine. Tail heaviness’s gone. Let’s keep working round them now.’
As Ira lifted his eyes to stare ahead again, the coast slid away to the left below. Before them was another 200 miles of ocean before they would pick up their next landfall in Newfoundland, which they’d planned to strike at Placentia Bay so as to cut across the narrow neck of land to Harbour Grace to make their final check at St John’s. When they left St John’s they would already have flown almost half of the way to Ireland and would still have farther to fly than Alcock and Brown. Despite the storms, however, it was probably the easier half, though from that point on there would be no landmarks on the restless plains of the sea, and the emptiness of the night would spread no pathways ahead of them.
In these northern waters, too, there would be no ships to whom they might fly in case of trouble, because they were too far off the shipping routes. But they’d left the clouds behind them now over the land, and apart from a few high streaks of cirrus the sky was clear ahead of them.
Alix took the controls again, settling into her seat and peering over the engine cowling where the last threads of water from the squalls they’d passed through jerked and shuddered behind the projections. Her face was calm, and it was clear no thoughts of danger or apprehension were running through her mind. Her dark eyes were forthright and unemotional, and Ira knew she’d never panic whatever happened; and in the last extremity, there’d be no complaints, no accusations, no acrimonious blame. She had the right temperament for ventures of this sort, and her behaviour was beyond reproach.
The sky was quite clear now except for scraps of high cirrus, and the sun was bright enough for them to see on the underside of the wing the shadow of the registration letters painted on the upper surface. The engine note was deep and safe, all the dials reading exactly as they ought, and Alix shifted in her seat, moving on the cushion, one hand on the control column, the other hovering over the throttle, the mixture control, the switches, constantly checking that all was well and functioning as it should.
‘Keep this course, Alix,’ Ira said. ‘We should see Placentia Bay in two hours’ time. You’ll have high land on your left and only a narrow strip between you and the Atlantic.’
‘OK.’ She nodded and Ira sank back in his seat. Turning his head, he saw her eyes on him briefly and her mouth lifted in a smile.
The sea looked colder now, paler in colour than they’d previously seen it, as though the wind were stirring sand from the vast depths below the turbulent surface. Now that they were over the sea again, with nothing against which they could check their course – no item of interest to impinge against a drowsy mind to jar it into wakefulness – tiredness flooded across him. The previous day had been longer and more arduous than either of them would have wished, but there had been no foreseeing it and, in the emergency of Courtney’s collapse, no way of avoiding it. On their trip from San Antonio to New York, they had been less taxed by events, despite the faulty pump, and had known at this period in their flight that half their journey was behind them so that their wits had been alert for the crossing of the Appalachians, and they had been wide awake for signs of the storm they’d been racing.
This time, however, they had started tired and they couldn’t feel that they’d reached the hump and were nearing home. They had another twenty-five hours – more than a whole day – before they could know their journey was ending, another journey as long as the one they’d already flown before they could feel they’d completed even half the route. And two hours from now there would be nothing ahead of them, no mountains, no rivers, no landmarks to jog their minds to work, only an unending stretch of ocean to dull their wits.
When he glanced again at Alix, her head had fallen forward a little but her expression was alert and relaxed and the lines that had already begun to form on her face were smoothed away. There was a great deal of fine spirit in her, he thought, and a great deal of courage, up to now probably all wrongly applied and driven by her father’s failed ambitions into all the wrong channels.
The sun had passed its zenith now and was sinking behind the aircraft. Ahead, the colour of the heavens was deeper, because it was from that eastern sky that the night would rise to meet them. Ira moved in his seat, feeling no great need to be on the alert. Alix could fly a course accurately, and if he fell asleep she would wake him in an emergency.
He turned his head and she smiled. ‘Eight hundred and fifty miles flown, Alix,’ he said.
‘It’ll do,’ she said. ‘I think the wind’s coming round behind and there’s ice below.’
She jerked her head forward and Ira sat up as fragments of dazzling white caught his eyes. A great field of frozen water lay below them, tumbled and broken, the pieces – as big as tennis courts and ten feet thick – forced on end by the pressure.
She was staring down with narrowed eyes. ‘Wasn’t it somewhere here the Titanic hit?’ she asked.
‘Further south. It breaks off the northern ice field in the spring and drifts towards the sun.’
The light was coming up at them from below now, striking the roof of the cabin to give a double brilliance to the day.
‘Byrd flew over this sort of thing to the Pole last year,’ Ira said.
She made a movement with her shoulder. ‘Didn’t help him
much today.’ She gestured at the ice. ‘If it was smoother, you could land on it, do an overhaul and take off again.’
‘Suppose you didn’t make it? I wouldn’t fancy spending a night down there.’
They talked idly for a while, watching the twisted moon-surface of the broken white field passing below them, the sun glinting on the angles of the up-ended floes as though on the facets of a diamond. Every now and again as the ice flung the sun directly back at them, there was a flash of gold that was dazzling and unexpected, and here and there the water showed in black angular streaks zigzagging to the north. Along them wisps of fog clung low over the water, following the line of the gaps in the patches of mist.
Alix’s eyes were roving over the instruments and her hand hovered over the throttle. ‘How about bringing it back a bit, Ira?’ she suggested, ‘We’re making good progress and it’ll conserve fuel.’
‘OK.’
As the tachometer needle fell back a fraction, she looked at him curiously.
‘You ever been lost, Ira? Completely lost, I mean.’
‘Not half. Once in 1919 in Russia. I ran out of fuel. A farmer with a cart towed me back. I was scared as hell. Bolshevik cavalry was around.’
‘What was it like being in the middle of a revolution?’
‘It’s worse when it’s someone else’s revolution.’
They were merely talking for the sake of talking, letting their thoughts drift idly as the conversation drove away the listlessness that came from the drone of the engine and the long hours of sitting still. The sun was lower now and as it fell the lassitude of evening came on them strongly. They’d done a good day’s work already, and they’d had no sleep the night before, and the prospect of staying awake listening to the pounding of the exhausts was a daunting one because it would be only too easy to fall asleep after dark when there wasn’t even a horizon to look at.
Could that have happened to Nungesser and Coli? Had they reached this very area when sleeplessness had caused their eyelids to drop so that they’d recovered consciousness to find the horizon already spinning up to them, alert too late to save themselves? Or had dulled senses carried them into the craggy cliffs of Newfoundland, to smash into the granite rocks at the end of their flight, in some lonely spot where their machine had fallen back into the sea unseen so that they’d apparently disappeared into the darkness? Or had they been more successful than anyone knew and would they still turn up, somewhere in Canada, their landfall overflown in the night?
Ira jerked himself back to common sense, knowing such a thing was impossible. Such beliefs were simply hope persisting beyond reason, as it always did.
* * *
The beat of the engine was beginning to numb their senses now and the routine checks they made were a welcome break in the monotony. After eleven hours of flying it was easy to relax.
Ira was peering intently at the charts, however, and a worried look appeared on Alix’s face as he sat up and began to stare ahead.
‘Alix’ – his voice was concerned – ‘we ought to have hit Placentia Bay by now. I reckon Hughesden aircraft compasses are about as well developed as Hughesden pumps.’
He gestured forward.
‘Should be right ahead and below us,’ he said.
He glanced at the clock, frowning. They ought to have been well down the neck of the bay now and heading for the strip of land that separated it from the north coast of Newfoundland.
He sat forward in his seat, peering towards the north-west. Instinct alone told him their course.
‘Alix,’ he said. ‘Turn north-east.’
She swung the machine to port, both of them staring ahead now, uneasiness gnawing at their stomachs.
‘I’ve been on course all the time,’ Alix said after a while, her eyes anxious.
‘I know that. Don’t worry.’
‘There!’ Her quick eyes caught a shadow ahead of them and she opened the throttle at once. So far, in spite of the small things that had gone wrong, neither of them had worried much, but now they suddenly awakened to the fact that they might easily have gone on ploughing over the North Atlantic, into the empty ocean south of Greenland, further and further towards ice and snow and oblivion.
‘There, Ira!’ Alix’s hand jerked. ‘That must be St John’s!’
They were able to pick out a small city, set in a deep crevice in the iron cliffs, a huddle of flat-roofed buildings circling the edge of an inlet. Ragged mountains surrounded it, the entrance to the harbour a bottleneck between the peaks. It was filled with fishing boats, their thin masts moving gently on the swell that edged round the entrance from the sea, and they saw men moving along the wharves with ropes and tackles and barrows.
‘We must have been forty miles to the south of our course,’ Ira said. ‘That damned Hughesden’s getting worse.’
They flew along the rugged coastline for a time, their eyes on the mountains. A few of them carried snow on their eastern and northern sides where the sun couldn’t reach, and the splashes of white made the craggy slopes look ugly and threatening.
‘Wind’s freshened again from the west,’ Alix said. ‘Look at the smoke.’
Thin fragmentary ribbons streamed towards the Atlantic, and the Dixie’s wings rocked as she was caught by the gusts coming through the mountains.
Fortunately, they had found their landmark in time, and their engine was still sound, and if they flew their course, even with a margin for error, they could hardly miss Europe. Nevertheless, it was a sobering thought that, after eleven and a half hours of flying, their compass was proved wholly uncertain at a time when there was nothing ahead of them but 2,000 miles of the Atlantic’s steep stream.
‘Better take a look around, Alix,’ Ira suggested. ‘This is the last view of land.’
Ahead of them was only the unknown. Only Alcock and Brown and the American flying boats heading for the Azores had successfully gone before them.
‘Keep checking with Sammy’s Chicks’ Own, Alix,’ Ira suggested. ‘We can probably get an idea then how much the compass is out.’
He felt her move restlessly in the seat alongside him, and glancing at her he saw her brows were drawn down.
‘When we get back,’ she said, ‘I’ll go see that Hughesden lawyer and sock him on the nose. I didn’t like him much, anyway.’
Chapter 9
The horizon was already taking on the rich blue of evening, the colour coming up out of the east like a slowly rising curtain, and with approaching darkness came an edge of worry to pervade their senses.
Alix leaned forward and moved the magneto switches one after the other. If the rev counter needle had flickered back to its stop as a magneto failed to respond, there were still fields in Newfoundland within reach where they might safely have set down their machine while it was still daylight. They were still in a position to turn on their course and reach safety if trouble arose, but soon they would reach a point when it would become safer to go on and, with night upon them, that point would be arriving in the hours of darkness when their calculations might be affected by fatigue. In a very short time, even the barren landing fields of Newfoundland would be denied to them, too, by the darkness that would obscure the folds of the land, and there would be only the lights of St John’s beyond the purple glare of the exhaust to give them direction, and nothing to help them to earth but their skill and their luck.
* * *
Rested, Ira took over the control column as darkness fell. Below them the sea was growing fainter and the land had fallen far away behind. The wind was blowing strongly from the north-west now, carrying them southward towards the shipping routes and away from the shortest crossing, and they would have to watch this all the time to compensate for drift, particularly with the earth inductor giving wrong readings. During the night, it would be largely guesswork, because they would no longer be able to gauge the strength of the wind by the feathery streaks they could see on the surface of the water.
He glanced down at the map across his
knees, just able to make it out in the last of the light. Errors of course were the chief hazard of long-distance flying, as trivial faults multiplied with every additional mile and each change of course. An error of a mile after ten miles became ten after a hundred and 400 after 4,000. An error now could throw them out as much as 500 miles by their journey’s end.
Night flying over charted country was a lonely business at any time, but to fly in unbroken darkness without the guidance of beams or the knowledge that somewhere ahead was a well-lit landmark was a daunting prospect even to the most experienced. And over an ocean as big as the Atlantic, with the knowledge that they would see no more landmarks for at least sixteen hours, Ira found his mind full of the dead weight of irrelevant hopes, with, behind them, a realistic prayer for just a little luck. In spite of the knowledge of flight, they hadn’t really conquered the air, and men as skilled as he was who had laid their plans no less carefully, whose machines were just as well designed, had disappeared into the darkness over oceans, vanishing into oblivion as if they had flown into a cloud and never reappeared. Without luck, he could drift off the face of the earth as surely as St Romain fifteen days before over the South Atlantic, or Nungesser on the very route he was following now.
He glanced again at the map but it was growing too dark now to see anything more than the outlines, and in the shadowy sea below them there was nothing now by which they could fix their position; and, since they had vanished east into the growing darkness, nothing by which anyone else could fix it, either.