Ginger thought for a moment before answering. "I suppose you would think I was exaggerating if I said that we may have saved the continent of America from devastation.
You'd call that an achievement of major importance—wouldn't you?"
I certainly would," acknowledged Henry. "But do you really mean that?"
"Definitely. Indeed, Donald is firmly convinced that we saved the world—although, of course, the human population of this ball of mud which we call the earth is blissfully unaware of it. Mind you, I'm not asserting that this is so ; but Donald thinks so, and he's no fool. But for the fact that I had something to do with it, which would make my opinion sound like conceit, I should say that the Doctor isn't far wrong. Five years ago people went on enjoying themselves, little knowing that a purple cloud, a cloud of death, was forming in the west."
"Where, exactly?"
"Central America. The state known as Nicaragua—which; incidentally, is a bigger place than you might suppose."
" And what was this cloud?" persisted Henry. "That's a longish story."
"Never mind, go ahead and tell us."
"Yes, Ginger," put in some of the others who had been listening.
"All right," agreed Ginger, and this is the story as he told it: We were following the Pan-American route from South America to the United States in our trusty old aircraft, the Wanderer. We had no intention of landing in Nicaragua, but we ran into a head wind which slowed us down, and brought the petrol gauge lower than was comfortable. So Biggles, to be on the safe side, put the Wanderer down at Managua—that's the capital—to fill up. It took us some time to get the petrol, so as we were in no particular hurry we decided to stay the night.
Nicaragua is a nice spot, fertile, but like most of the Central American states, undeveloped. That doesn't worry the population, who are happy in their own quiet way under a real democratic Government. They are a pastoral people, and make a fairly comfortable living out of the soil. They don't have to work very hard to do that, and as they don't believe in working hard, they are content. They export coffee and bananas—I mention this for reasons which you will understand presently.
At the time we were there everyone was talking about a purple cloud, so sitting at a cafe in the evening, Biggles, who speaks Spanish, the local language, asked a citizen what all the fuss was about. He told us that the thing had begun when, about a year before, a canoe had come down the Matagena River with a family on board. It seems that they owned a banana plantation way back in the hinterland, and they had a tragic story to tell.
They said that one evening a little purple cloud had appeared in the west. It passed over during the night—at least, there was no sign of it in the morning. Nor was there any sign of the plantation. Everything except the hard wood had gone. The earth was as bare as the middle of the Sahara. Not a leaf, not a blade of grass, remained. The wretched owners of the land were not
only ruined but were faced with immediate starvation. They abandoned their farm and came down the river. A paragraph about this appeared in the local newspaper, but nobody took any notice.
Then more boats started coming down the river, and the tales the people in them told were always the same—always the same purple cloud that appeared in the evening and ate the country clean. One thing was significant. In the first place, the cloud was only a small affair, about an acre in extent; but the later reports made it clear that the cloud was swiftly getting bigger. By the end of six months it had become a formidable menace, not only in size but in its devastating effects. Family after family came down the river as plantation after plantation was wiped out. By the time we got there the whole north-eastern section of the country had been devastated; and the thing, whatever it was, was still spreading.
Yet so casual are these people, who never do to-day what can be put off until to-morrow, that nothing was done about it. True, a special committee had been appointed by the Government to investigate the matter, but they were still arguing as to how to set about it. The people who were most upset, and pressed for immediate action, were a few American managers of United States fruit companies. They were getting worried, and I don't wonder at it.
Discussing the matter, I could see that both Biggles and Donald took a serious view of this purple cloud. What they realized, although nobody else did, was this : if the cloud went on growing it was only a question of time before it spread beyond the frontiers of Nicaragua. The adjacent countries. of Costa Rica, Salvador and Honduras would be the next to feel the scourge, after which both North and South America could expect the purple visitation. By that time the thing might be so large that nobody, nothing, could stop it. At the rate the thing was growing, it was not outside the bounds of possibility that ultimately this cloud would destroy the world.
As a result of our discussion Biggles and Donald went along to the special committee to see if they—or rather, the aircraft—could be of any assistance. Actually, I think they were both prompted more by curiosity than any other reason. Donald certainly was. All his biological instincts were aroused. It happened that when they got to the committee room an American planter, named Silas Weimer, was there, playing havoc because nothing had been done. He jumped at Biggles's offer, and persuaded the committee to accept it. The result was that instead of our going on in the morning as per schedule, we found ourselves booked for the wide open spaces, the back of beyond of Nicaragua, looking for a purple cloud. It was a fascinating proposition, and I must confess that I was as curious as the others to see what this cloud was made of.
• Starting at dawn, we got to the cloud-infested country the same day and established a base on a lake. The following morning we made our first survey flight, and I may tell you that it didn't take us long to confirm that the purple cloud was no myth. Admittedly, we didn't see the cloud, but we saw vast areas where the land had been cleared of vegetation, miles and miles of earth picked as clean as a dry bone. It looked pretty grim from the air.
Besides the plantations, whole forests had been stricken as though by lightning; all that remained were the leafless trunks and branches. It created an impression of wholesale death and destruction—not very nice, believe me. The question was, what had caused it?
Perhaps I'd better give you an idea of what the hinterland of Nicaragua is like. Most of it is tropical forest, through which one or two big rivers flow. The rest is what they call savannah—open grassland that in the States would be called prairie. Here the people have their farms and plantations. They plant crops until the ground is impoverished, then they burn down a few hundred acres of forest. When it has burnt out they
• leave the old land and move on to the new, rich soil. Villages are few and far between.
At the time of our visit the country had been practically evacuated on account of the purple cloud.
Well, we spent three days flying round, and in that time explored most of the north-east triangle of the country—the affected part. There was only one spot we hadn't seen,_ and that was the remote northerly corner. Before doing that we had to go back for more petrol, and I could see Biggles was getting worried. Petrol is expensive in Nicaragua; we were using a lot, and if we didn't soon produce results we might not get paid for it.
However, we went back, heading north. The country was dead all the way. There was still no sign of the elusive cloud, and, frankly, I'd begun to wonder if we weren't making fools of ourselves, looking for something that didn't exist. I said so to Donald. We were flying over open savannah, or what had been savannah, at the time, and it may have been this fact that gave him the bright idea of landing to see just what had happened to the ground. Remember, so far we had only seen the devastation from the air.
It sounded a sensible scheme. If we could make a close examination of the leafless trees we might be able to form an idea of what agency, animal, mineral or vegetable, had caused the damage. 'Biggles agreed, so he cut the engine, lowered the wheels, and glided down to land. I went and sat next to him.
We glided down to
a few hundred feet, and he leaned over the side, staring at the ground.
"That's queer," he said in a puzzled voice. " I don't think I ever saw ground quite that colour."
It was, in fact, a sort of reddish brown.
The words had barely left his lips when I saw the most amazing phenomenon I've ever seen in my life. The effect was so extraordinary that I wondered for an instant if I'd got a touch of fever. The ground seemed to float up towards us. Naturally, I came to the conclusion that although the Wanderer was practically on even keel we were in some extra?
rdinary way losing height bodily, so to speak. As a matter of fact, I've known a machine to be sucked down like that when it hits a "sinker ", which is the reverse of hitting a bump.
But we weren't being sucked down. The carpet was
coming up to meet us. It may seem extraordinary, but I must confess that the purple cloud did not occur to me. One usually looks up, not down, for clouds.
Then the Cloud hit us. It hit the keel with a smack, as though we had made a bad landing on smooth water. At the last instant I realized what was happening, and so, I think, did Biggles, for I heard him yell something. The next second we were swallowed up in a dark, reddish-brown fog. In a flash it had smothered the windscreen, and I could see it tearing past the windows. The inside of the machine was nearly as dark as midnight. I tell you, it was a weird sensation. It made me dizzy.
Biggles jerked on the engine and pulled the stick back. The machine zoomed, and I guessed he was trying to get above the stuff, whatever it was. At the same time Donald's curiosity must have got the better of him, for he opened one of the side windows a fraction of an inch to collect a specimen of the cloud. Well, he got it. Before you could say Jack Robinson the stuff was pouring in like muddy water. Algy yelled, "Look out ! It'
s alive!"
And so it was. The cloud was composed of myriads of insects, like tiny locusts. It was clear that we were in a mess—and that's the only thing that was clear. Biggles yelled to Donald to shut the window, but he couldn't, because the stuff, flung back by the slipstream, was being lashed into his face like purple hailstones. As the insects struck him they seemed to burst, and his face and shoulders were a sticky purple mass of slime.
The inside of the cabin, where the insects struck, was in the same unholy mess. Had the insects been poisonous we should have been goners, there's no doubt of that. As it was, I thought our time had come, for while we were still in the cloud the engine choked, and I didn't need telling what was wrong. The insects were being sucked into the air intake, and so filling the cylinders with a lovely purple glue.
Biggles started gliding down. There was nothing else he could do. I got ready for the crash when we hit the floor, for there was no question of seeing it. I was trying to remember what was underneath, whether the
ground was flat or undulating, when the cloud turned rust colour, and then pale mauve.
We had run out of it. We were only just in time, too, for we were within fifty feet of the ground. At the last second the engine picked up again, with the most horrible noise you ever heard; it didn't give full revs, but it gave us enough power to choose a landing place.
Looking back, I could see our exhaust spurting stuff like violet ink—the pulverized corpses of the bugs that had been through the engine.
How Biggles got the machine down I don't know because it was still practically dark, owing to the cloud that hung over us. It seemed to stretch for miles, heading in a northerly direction. When we were down we got out and had a look at the machine. You never saw such a sight. When we started it was silver; now it was purple. It oozed filthy purple slime at every point. It
i
dripped. We weren't much better ourselves, f it comes to that.
Biggles looked at the cloud for a minute, then ordered us back into the machine.
"What are you going to do?" asked Donald. "Follow it,' answered Biggles tersely.
"What for ? " gasped Algy.
"We've got to see where this pest has its headquarters," returned Biggles. "Don't you realize that these creatures are increasing every day? If that cloud gets much bigger it won't be a matter of just wiping out Nicaragua. Once it overflows into the Amazon basin there'll be no stopping it. It will eat up the entire continent."
We hadn't thought of that. I think it gave us all a shock to realize that if nothing was done about the cloud, the world was in for a thin time.
Well, we took off again and chased the cloud. We followed it for about a hundred miles, and saw it disappear into one of the many big lakes. When we cruised over the water there wasn't a sign of it. It was plain enough to see what was happening. The locusts—
they were a sort of locust—lived in the lake. What had given them birth we don't know, but there they were. Every evening the cloud rose and swept out across the country to a fresh pasture, where it devoured everything before returning to the lake.
We headed back for Managua, and just managed to creep in with a wheezing engine.
Biggles found Silas Weimer, the American planter, and gave him the facts. Welmer went to the committee and did some fast talking. We went with him. What was to be done?
Between us we worked it out. The only chance was to destroy the insects by spraying them from the air, in the same way they now spray cotton fields to kill the pests, and in Africa spray swamps to kill the mosquitoes. We cabled the United States for a strong insecticide to be sent down by air. At the same time Biggles rang up the United States Department of Agriculture and warned them of the danger. That set things buzzing.
The next day machines began to arrive with the poison, and the spraying apparatus. We worked like slaves getting the Wanderer ready for the attack. As soon as she was ready we went to work. Flying twelve hours a day is hard work, and we kept that up for a week. We sprayed the lake, and the country round it. Every evening the cloud rose up as usual, but every evening it was smaller. In the end we finished off the survivors in the air. We sat aloft and waited for the cloud—now quite small—to appear. Then we let the insects have it. We chased them whichever way they turned, and the cloud grew smaller and smaller until it finally fizzled out altogether. The next evening the cloud failed to appear and we knew that our job was done. All the same, we put in another week spraying the whole of the affected section, and that, apparently, completed the trick. The purple cloud was never seen again, and we heard afterwards that the blighted areas were recovering. Well, that's the story. It was not until it was all over, and we had a good talk about it, that we realized fully what might have happened if the old Wanderer hadn't turned up when she did, or if we'd gone on without hearing of the purple cloud. The people who are now fighting each other in Europe little know how near they came to being wiped out altogether, for if the bugs had got out of hand there wouldn't have been a leaf, or a blade of grass left on the face of the earth. By the time the insects had finished it would have been just a ball of mud. Every living thing would have, died of starvation, including the bugs themselves, and the old world would have had to start all over again from the beginning. Think about that when you go to bed—it's a fascinating thought.
Ginger looked at the clock. " Great Scott ! " he muttered, "look at the time. And I'm on early patrol in the morning."
VII
THE ADVENTURE OF THE PATAGONIAN
GIANTS
"THE news seems to be pretty gloomy," remarked Flying-Officer Henry Harcourt, switching off the mess radio and turning away from the instrument. "Still, perhaps it isn't as bad as they make out."
"Dash it, you can't expect to win all the time," protested Tug Carrington.
"Good for you, Tug," put in Flying-Officer Ginger Hebblethwaite. "Some people are never satisfied. The trouble is, they don't think. In fact, taking it all round, the human race is a queer mixture of contradictions."
"So what, professor ? " inquired Tex O'Hara sarcastically.
"Nothing," returned Ginger imperturbably. "I just made a remark. I'll qualify it if
you like. People will. always believe what they want to believe; conversely, they scoff at anything they don't like. When sailors first came home and said they had seen fishes flying in the air, people laughed. Nobody believed it. Yet those same people who wouldn'
t believe that a fish could fly were quite willing to believe the clever rougues who walked about the country professing to be able to tell fortunes. The same with some of these yarns I've been telling you about Dr. Duck. Who, outside this mess, would believe them?
You probably wouldn't believe them yourselves but for the fact that Biggles and Algy are here to bear me out. I say there are thousands of people in this country ready to sneer at anything unusual, just because they've never seen the thing, or because it is never likely to bring them any profit; yet they're quite willing to pay five shillings for a bottle of coloured water guaranteed to cure all ills—just because some quack says so.,,
"You don't believe in patent medicines, evidently?" observed Taffy Hughes.
"I didn't say that," denied Ginger. "Some of them are probably very good, and do what is claimed of them. In fact, I once nearly started in business in that line myself."
There was a shout of laughter, but Ginger remained serious. "That's right, go on, laugh,"
he sneered. "Why, you poor goofs, I once had my hands on a kind of medicine that would—but never mind."
"Come on, what would it do? " demanded Lord Bertie Lissie, polishing his eyeglass.
"It would give you the strength of ten men," declared Ginger calmly. After a dose of this muscle-syrup you could have put a garden roller on your shoulder and walked off with it—if you'd wanted a garden roller."
"Now—now," chided Bertie reprovingly.
"On the label of my bottles I was going to have a picture of a fellow tossing an elephant into the air, and underneath the slogan, 'Every Man His Own Samson '," returned Ginger calmly.
"Why didn't you ? " inquired Henry suspiciously. "Because there was a snag in it,"
27 Biggles - Charter Pilot Page 6