Airman's Odyssey: Wind, Sand and Stars; Night Flight; and Flight to Arras
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Ranging from the northern skies of France to the South American Andes, this volume includes two memoirs and a novel, each informed by the lauded pilot and poet’s experiences as a pioneering aviator during World War II.
Wind, Sand and Stars
Recounting his early days flying airmail routes across the African Sahara, Saint-Exupéry explores the spiritual, philosophical, and physical wonders of navigating the passes of the Pyrenees, the peaks of the Andes, and the wasteland of the Libyan desert. This memoir, a National Book Award winner that was voted a National Geographic Top Ten Adventure Book of All Time, is “a beautiful book, a brave book, and a book that should be read against the confusion of this world” (The New York Times).
Night Flight
Overseeing night-mail flights in Buenos Aires, Riviere is a believer in remaining faithful to the mission and has trained his pilots to stave off the fear of death. But when he discovers that one of his planes is lost in a storm after flying out of Patagonia, both his authority and his beliefs will be challenged, in a novel that won France’s Prix Femina Award and was made into a classic film.
Flight to Arras
Saint-Exupéry’s memoir of a harrowing reconnaissance mission during the Battle of France in 1940—as one of only a handful of pilots who continued to fight in solidarity against the inevitable German invasion—was a recipient of the Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Aéro-Club de France.
“Saint-Exupéry . . . blends adventure with reflection in a way few writers have.” —Richard Bach
Translated by Lewis Galantière and Stuart Gilbert
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), born in Lyons, France, is one of the world’s best loved and widest read writers. His timeless fable, The Little Prince, has sold more than 100 million copies and has been translated into nearly every language. His pilot’s memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars, won the National Book Award and was named the #1 adventure book of all time by Outside magazine and was ranked #3 on National Geographic Adventure’s list of all-time-best exploration books. His other books include Night Flight; Southern Mail; and Airman's Odyssey. A pilot at twenty-six, he was a pioneer of commercial aviation and flew in the Spanish Civil War and World War II. In 1944, while flying a reconnaissance mission for his French air squadron, he disappeared over the Mediterranean. Stacy Schiff is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of several bestselling biographies and historical works including, most recently, The Witches: Salem, 1692. In 2018 she was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. Awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was inducted into the Academy in 2019. Schiff has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Los Angeles Times, among many other publications. She lives in New York City.
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Airman's Odyssey - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Introduction
Wind, Sand and Stars
The Craft
The Men
The Tool
The Elements
The Plane and the Planet
Oasis
Men of the Desert
Prisoner of the Sand
Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
Conclusion
Night Flight
Preface
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
Flight to Arras
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Copyright 1939 by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Copyright renewed 1967 by Lewis Galantière
Copyright 1942, 1932 by Harcourt, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 1984 by Harcourt, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
www.hmhco.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 1900–1944.
Airman’s odyssey
Translation of 3 stories from French.
Reprint. Originally published: New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, [1943]
Contents: Introduction—Wind, sand and stars—Night flight—Flight to Arras.
1. Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 1900–1944—Translations, English. 2. Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 1900–1944—Biography. 3. Authors, French—20th century—Biography. 4. Air pilots—France—Biography. 5. World War, 1939–1945—Personal narratives, French. I. Title.
PQ2637.A274A2 1984 848'.91209 84-10497
ISBN 978-0-15-603733-4 (pbk.)
eISBN 978-0-544-12808-8
v4.0817
He was expecting that his death would be the end of him. The individual is a mere path,
he had written in Flight to Arras. What matters is Man, who takes that path.
Had he stood clear and watched the Focke-Wulf fighter slide behind his unarmed reconnaissance plane that last day of July, had he seen the gunfire and the flames and his crash into the sea, he might have said, Poor old Saint-Ex. Not a bad life, but now it’s done.
Given a chance, he might have told us what it felt like, those last moments; his words shaped and timed and brushed to match the colors of the sky and the sea and the fire rolling and pouring around him, his plane a comet trailing a scarf of night to meet a larger night, waiting. He didn’t have the chance, though, and the words never made it to print. As far as he knew, he was dead.
Buffing alone in the airport sun ten years later, coaxing a gray aluminum Luscombe 8E training plane into mirrors and flying lessons, I was swept in wonderment. This wing, this very metal under my cloth, it’s been above the clouds! This whole entire airplane, it’s flown so high it’s been out of sight from earth . . . a person could look straight up and never see it, it’s been so high, so free, so unlocked from the world! Nobody else thought such things, I’d bet, except me and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
The stories you can tell, I whispered to the engine cowling, to the rudder. The far places, the storms and rains and winds, the world you’ve seen beyond the fence of my horizons! Tell me, airplane, will I one day learn to fly? Will my love of freedom and control conquer my fear of heights and spins?
Those questions I could ask the Luscombe, but since it would be years before I’d know how to listen to her answers, I heard only silence, the muffled rasp of terry cloth on smoothing mirror.
No one else could I ask. The few aviators I had met were as frosty and unspeaking as they had been in Saint-Exupéry’s day, wrapped in an intimidating cloak of knowledge and flight time. They spoke little, even to each other. Nobody said a word about above the clouds or unlocking from the world. A brief nod, perhaps, on the way to their aircraft, then they’d close themselves in a cockpit, an engine would start in a whirl of wind and fire, and moments later they’d be golden specks dwindling north, disappearing east, vanishing west in sunny haze.
The only pilot who spoke much to me then was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the one who would have sworn he was dead. Home at night, I turned the pages of Airman’s Odyssey, savoring the acquaintance of this man turned intimate instead of intimidating by what he had learned. Better than standing beside him, I stood inside his mind while he watched the weather, studied the routes that he would fly. When this one pilot started his engine and flew over his horizons, he didn’t disappear; he came closer to me.
I was there, unsure and nervous before that first flight with the mails from Toulouse to Alicante, listening to our friend Guillamet: Think of those who went through it before you, and say to yourself, ‘What they could do, I can do.’
Of course, I nodded, looking up from the page. Of course I can do it! And with that I joined every other person who has become an airplane pilot: I put my fears aside and learned.
I had Saint-Exupéry’s map to follow of what to expect flying might be . . . a fairy-tale world of sunlight on an ocean of clouds; of sheep dashing down distant hillsides, attacking airplane wheels; instruments glowing in soft-night cockpits; stars like beacons set afire for pilots to steer by; gazelles unfolded from seaside deserts; monster winds gnashing airplanes like croissants for breakfast. He told me that I wasn’t alone, that it was all right for me to be touched and changed by the glory of flight.
In his day, aviation was a risky job for the none-too-well educated, work for the not-too-thoughtful who fancied early violent death at the controls of large crashable machines. People of reflective mind did not become heavy-equipment drivers in those times, even if the heavy equipment had wings and flew. His books were read with the same startled bafflement as we would have reading a tractor driver’s books today . . . what insight and humor and humanity, found on the blade of a bulldozer!
In writing what he saw and learned from aviation, Saint-Exupéry shattered a stereotype. Out of the pieces came a model for something new: the thoughtful airplane pilot, the articulate flyer. Living and writing as he does in these three books of Airman’s Odyssey, he gave permission for others to become more than robots pushing the controls of a machine.
When I was a pilot with an American air force fighter squadron in France, stationed two hundred miles north of Toulouse, 37 years north of 1926, I turned again to the ideas that I had read when I was the kid with airplane polish in his hands.
Sleep blown away by the siren just outside our window, bolted through the dark to airplanes fueled and loaded for war, scrambled into our machines and slammed high-speed through checklists, we were set to start engines and launch into the night. One coded word on the radio from the general and we’d be fired like missiles against our secret targets to the east. Without that word, it wasn’t war, it was just another practice alert. We waited in our dim-glowing cockpits.
France, I thought. I’m here tonight in the homeland of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry! I remembered my old friend and teacher, thought about the way he had chosen to live and die. If I could squeeze his books until just two words remained, I asked myself, what two words would they be? There must be one idea that mattered more. . . .
Affirm Life. It mattered more to him than his own living.
The bombs clung dark as the night to my wings, leeches anxious to suck the life from a city whose crime it was to have been built in the wrong half of Germany. I shook my head, ever so slightly, listened to empty static on the radio. No word yet to launch.
Saint-Ex, I thought, if the code came in your earphones, would you fly to the target and turn midnight to noon, would you cremate living people because some general told you to?
Dark. Moonless starless darkful night.
I don’t know jet planes or computers or nuclear weapons, he said. What I know is that long before you die, Richard, you’ll begin answering to yourself for every life-denying choice you’ve made.
Never once had the air force, for all its fixation on classrooms, taught pilots a course in Individual Responsibility for the Murder of Cities. I needed teaching, fast. In all my training, I had never thought, that’s not the general’s thumb on the bomb release, it’s mine!
Antoine, old friend, can a line pilot, can a first lieutenant waiting ready in the cockpit, can he decide by himself to follow other laws than military? Can I choose a different future than sudden noon for my city, can I choose not to arm the bombs, can I fly low and lay the things down cold in some pasture outside city limits?
A lightning answer. Before you turned fighter pilot, he said, you turned human being. Before you gave allegiance to the military you gave allegiance to life.
The other pilots out past my wings in the dark, I thought, Jim Roudabush and Pat Flanagan and Ed Carpinello, are they thinking too? We never talked about it, not once a word about what our life might be like after we had murdered a city. Roudy and Pat, Carp and I, were here not because we wanted to kill people but because every one of us loved to fly airplanes, and the highest-performance airplanes happen to be owned by the military forces of every country in the world. Air forces seduce pilots by shouting, Fly! If instead they shouted Kill! would there be young men and women in military cockpits today?
"If you are to be," his words echoed that night, "you must begin by assuming responsibility." And you alone are responsible for every moment of your life, for every one of your acts. Not the general. You.
What would be the penalty, I thought suddenly, if one of us, or three or twelve . . . what sentence if every pilot of every nation just happened to drop bombs that didn’t detonate? Could it be worse than the penalty we’d pay if we dropped bombs that did?
I listened, waiting in my airplane for the war to start. I’ll never know what I would have done had the order come to incinerate that city. But I was hearing his words, I was watching myself, and I was thinking about it.
In Wind, Sand and Stars, in Flight to Arras, how carefully he watched, with such calm judgment Saint-Exupéry measured his own choices, his own humanity. Whether he lived or died didn’t seem to make much difference to him—time and again he set off on adventures that placed human values over personal survival. His books are plays of light around a person who cared most of all for the community of humankind, who loved most of all to be part of that community, fashioning its destiny on our little planet.
I don’t agree with everything he says, this old friend I’ve never met, and some of his views still sound to me clipped and stiffened by his time. Yet the power of an idea is not measured by its eagerness to please or the date of its words; it is measured by the change that it brings in the lives of its readers.
If what I wish is to preserve on earth a given type of man and the particular energy that radiates from him,
says Saint-Exupéry, I must begin by salvaging the principles that animate that kind of man.
Change man to person and we have the core of the latest force for change in the whole of world society. The principle is Affirm Life, and at this writing it looks as if barely, one by one by ten by a hundred, just barely enough of us have begun a change that might yet steer the planet this side of destruction.
Saint-Exupéry writes with grace and beauty, surely; he blends adventure with reflection in a way few writers have. Along the way, he writes with a whimsical sense of life, writes with the kindness and courtesy to catch sparkling detail that he knows we’ll enjoy.
Adventure and reflection—that’s how he makes lifelong friends of kids with polishing rags. He invites communication, and he stays around to talk in spite of what happened that last day of July, 1944.
The world, he said, it isn’t Us and Them, it’s only Us!
Once set afire, ideas burn till they’re quenched in action. Twenty years from now, in the night cockpits and passenger cabins of our hypersonic transports, on the soft-lit decks of our space colonies, will a lot of kids turned friends of his ideas be seeing them for truth, watching the planet turn safely beneath their wings?
What would he say if they told him that he hadn’t died in the war?
Richard Bach
Wind, Sand and Stars
Translated from the French by Lewis Galantière
I
The Craft
In 1926 I was enrolled as student airline pilot by the Latécoère Company, the predecessors of Aéropostale (now Air France) in the operation of the line between Toulouse, in southwestern France, and Dakar, in French West Africa. I was learning the craft, undergoing an apprenticeship served by all young pilots before they were allowed to carry the mails. We took ships up on trial spins, made meek little hops between Toulouse and Perpignan, and had dreary lessons in meteorology in a freezing hangar. We lived in fear of the mountains of Spain, over which we had yet to fly, and in awe of our elders.
These veterans were to be seen in the field restaurant—gruff, not particularly approachable, and inclined somewhat to condescension when giving us the benefit of their experience. When one of them landed, rain-soaked and behind schedule, from Alicante or Casablanca, and one of us asked humble questions about his flight, the very curtness of his replies on these tempestuous days was matter enough out of which to build a fabulous world filled with snares and pitfalls, with cliffs suddenly looming out of fog and whirling air-currents of a strength to uproot cedars. Black dragons guarded the mouths of the valleys and clusters of lightning crowned the crests—for our elders were always at some pains to feed our reverence. But from time to time one or another of them, eternally to be revered, would fail to come back.
I remember, once, a homecoming of Bury, he who was later to die in a spur of the Pyrenees. He came into the restaurant, sat down at the common table, and went stolidly at his food, shoulders still bowed by the fatigue of his recent trial. It was at the end of one of those foul days when from end to end of the line the skies are filled with dirty weather, when the mountains seem to a pilot to be wallowing in slime like exploded cannon on the decks of an antique man-o’-war.
I stared at Bury, swallowed my saliva, and ventured after a bit to ask if he had had a hard flight. Bury, bent over his plate in frowning absorption, could not hear me. In those days we flew open ships and thrust our heads out round the windshield, in bad weather, to take our bearings: the wind that whistled in our ears was a long time clearing out of our heads. Finally Bury looked up, seemed to understand me, to think back to what I was referring to, and suddenly he gave a bright laugh. This brief burst of laughter, from a man who laughed little, startled me. For a moment his weary being was bright with it. But he spoke no word, lowered his head, and went on chewing in silence. And in that dismal restaurant, surrounded by the simple government clerks who sat there repairing the wear and tear of their humble daily tasks, my broad-shouldered messmate seemed to me strangely noble; beneath his rough hide I could discern the angel who had vanquished the dragon.
The night came when it was my turn to be called to the field manager’s room.
He said: You leave tomorrow.
I stood motionless, waiting for him to dismiss me. After a moment of silence he added:
I take it you know the regulations?
In those days the motor was not what it is today. It would drop out, for example, without warning and with a great rattle like the crash of crockery. And one would simply throw in one’s hand: there was no hope of refuge on the rocky crust of Spain. Here,
we used to say, when your motor goes, your ship goes, too.
An airplane, of course, can be replaced. Still, the important thing was to avoid a collision with the range; and blind flying through a sea of clouds in the mountain zones was subject to the severest penalties. A pilot in trouble who buried himself in the white cotton-wool of the clouds might all unseeing run straight into a peak. This was why, that night, the deliberate voice repeated insistently its warning:
Navigating by the compass in a sea of clouds over Spain is all very well, it is very dashing, but—
And I was struck by the graphic image:
But you want to remember that below the sea of clouds lies eternity.
And suddenly that tranquil cloud-world, that world so harmless and simple that one sees below on rising out of the clouds, took on in my eyes a new quality. That peaceful world became a pitfall. I imagined the immense white pitfall spread beneath me. Below it reigned not what one might think—not the agitation of men, not the living tumult and bustle of cities, but a silence even more absolute than in the clouds, a peace even more final. This viscous whiteness became in my mind the frontier between the real and the unreal, between the known and the unknowable. Already I was beginning to realize that a spectacle has no meaning except it be seen through the glass of a culture, a civilization, a craft. Mountaineers too know the sea of clouds, yet it does not seem to them the fabulous curtain it is to me.
When I left that room I was filled with a childish pride. Now it was my turn to take on at dawn the responsibility of a cargo of passengers and the African mails. But at the same time I felt very meek. I felt myself ill-prepared for this responsibility. Spain was poor in emergency fields; we had no radio; and I was troubled lest when I got into difficulty I should not know where to hunt a landing-place. Staring at the aridity of my maps, I could see no help in them; and so, with a heart full of shyness and pride, I fled to spend this night of vigil with my friend Guillaumet. Guillaumet had been over the route before me. He knew all the dodges by which one got hold of the keys to Spain. I should have to be initiated by Guillaumet.
When I walked in he looked up and smiled.
I know all about it,
he said. How do you feel?
He went to a cupboard and came back with glasses and a bottle of port, still smiling.
We’ll drink to it. Don’t worry. It’s easier than you think.
Guillaumet exuded confidence the way a lamp gives off light. He was himself later on to break the record for postal crossings in the Andes and the South Atlantic. On this night, sitting in his shirtsleeves, his arms folded in the lamplight, smiling the most heartening of smiles, he said to me simply:
You’ll be bothered from time to time by storms, fog, snow. When you are, think of those who went through it before you, and say to yourself, ‘What they could do, I can do.’
I spread out my maps and asked him hesitantly if he would mind going over the hop with me. And there, bent over in the lamplight, shoulder to shoulder with the veteran, I felt a sort of schoolboy peace.
But what a strange lesson in geography I was given! Guillaumet did not teach Spain to me, he made the country my friend. He did not talk about provinces, or peoples, or livestock. Instead of telling me about Guadix, he spoke of three orange-trees on the edge of the town: Beware of those trees. Better mark them on the map.
And those three orange-trees seemed to me thenceforth higher than the Sierra Nevada.
He did not talk about Lorca, but about a humble farm near Lorca, a living farm with its farmer and the farmer’s wife. And this tiny, this remote couple, living a thousand miles from where we sat, took on a universal importance. Settled on the slope of a mountain, they watched like lighthouse-keepers beneath the stars, ever on the lookout to succor men.
The details that we drew up from oblivion, from their inconceivable remoteness, no geographer had been concerned to explore. Because it washed the banks of great cities, the Ebro River was of interest to map-makers. But what had they to do with that brook running secretly through the water-weeds to the west of Motril, that brook nourishing a mere score or two of flowers?
Careful of that brook: it breaks up the whole field. Mark it on your map.
Ah, I was to remember that serpent in the grass near Motril! It looked like nothing at all, and its faint murmur sang to no more than a few frogs; but it slept with one eye open. Stretching its length along the grasses in the paradise of that emergency landing-field, it lay in wait for me a thousand miles from where I sat. Given the chance, it would transform me into a flaming candelabra. And those thirty valorous sheep ready to charge me on the slope of a hill! Now that I knew about them I could brace myself to meet them.
You think the meadow empty, and suddenly bang! there are thirty sheep in your wheels.
An astounded smile was all I could summon in the face of so cruel a threat.
Little by little, under the lamp, the Spain of my map became a sort of fairyland. The crosses I marked to indicate safety zones and traps were so many buoys and beacons. I charted the farmer, the thirty sheep, the brook. And, exactly where she stood, I set a buoy to mark the shepherdess forgotten by the geographers.
When I left Guillaumet on that freezing winter night, I felt the need of a brisk walk. I turned up my coat collar, and as I strode among the indifferent passers-by I was escorting a fervor as tender as if I had just fallen in love. To be brushing past these strangers with that marvelous secret in my heart filled me with pride. I seemed to myself a sentinel standing guard over a sleeping camp. These passers-by knew nothing about me, yet it was to me that, in their mail pouches, they were about to confide the weightiest cares of their hearts and their trade. Into my hands were they about to entrust their hopes. And I, muffled up in my cloak, walked among them like a shepherd, though they were unaware of my solicitude.
Nor were they receiving any of those messages now being despatched to me by the night. For this snowstorm that was gathering, and that was to burden my first flight, concerned my frail flesh, not theirs. What could they know of those stars that one by one were going out? I alone was in the confidence of the stars. To me alone news was being sent of the enemy’s position before the hour of battle. My footfall rang in a universe that was not theirs.
These messages of such grave concern were reaching me as I walked between rows of lighted shop-windows, and those windows on that night seemed a display of all that was good on earth, of a paradise of sweet things. In the sight of all this happiness, I tasted the proud intoxication of renunciation. I was a warrior in danger. What meaning could they have for me, these flashing crystals meant for men’s festivities, these lamps whose glow was to shelter men’s meditations, these cozy furs out of which were to emerge pathetically beautiful solicitous faces? I was still wrapped in the aura of friendship, dazed a little like a child on Christmas Eve, expectant of surprise and palpitatingly prepared for happiness; and yet already I was soaked in spray; a mail pilot, I was already nibbling the bitter pulp of night flight.
It was three in the morning when they woke me. I thrust the shutters open with a dry snap, saw that rain was falling on the town, and got soberly into my harness. A half-hour later I was out on the pavement shining with rain, sitting on my little valise and waiting for the bus that was to pick me up. So many other flyers before me, on their day of ordination, had undergone this humble wait with beating heart.
Finally I saw the old-fashioned vehicle come round the corner and heard its tinny rattle. Like those who had gone before me, I squeezed in between a sleepy customs guard and a few glum government clerks. The bus smelled musty, smelled of the dust of government offices into which the life of a man sinks as into a quicksand. It stopped every five hundred yards to take on another scrivener, another guard, another inspector.
Those in the bus who had already gone back to sleep responded with a vague grunt to the greeting of the newcomer, while he crowded in as well as he was able and instantly fell asleep himself. We jolted mournfully over the uneven pavements of Toulouse, I in the midst of these men who in the rain and the breaking day were about to take up again their dreary diurnal tasks, their red tape, their monotonous lives.
Morning after morning, greeted by the growl of the customs guard shaken out of sleep by his arrival, by the gruff irritability of clerk or inspector, one mail pilot or another got into this bus and was for the moment indistinguishable from these bureaucrats. But as the street lamps moved by, as the field drew nearer and nearer, the old omnibus rattling along lost little by little its reality and became a grey chrysalis from which one emerged transfigured.
Morning after morning a flyer sat here and felt of a sudden, somewhere inside the vulnerable man subjected to his neighbor’s surliness, the stirring of the pilot of the Spanish and African mails, the birth of him who, three hours later, was to confront in the lightnings the dragon of the mountains; and who, four hours afterwards, having vanquished it, would be free to decide between a detour over the sea and a direct assault upon the Alcoy range, would be free to deal with storm, with mountain, with ocean.
And thus every morning each pilot before me, in his time, had been lost in the anonymity of daybreak beneath the dismal winter sky of Toulouse, and each one, transfigured by this old omnibus, had felt the birth within him of the sovereign who, five hours later, leaving behind him the rains and snows of the North, repudiating winter, had throttled down his motor and begun to drift earthward in the summer air beneath the shining sun of Alicante.
The old omnibus has vanished, but its austerity, its discomfort, still live in my memory. It was a proper symbol of the apprenticeship we had to serve before we might possess the stern joys of our craft. Everything about it was intensely serious. I remember three years later, though hardly ten words were spoken, learning in that bus of the death of Lécrivain, one of those hundred pilots who on a day or a night of fog have retired for eternity.
It was four in the morning, and the same silence was abroad when we heard the field manager, invisible in the darkness, address the inspector:
Lécrivain didn’t land at Casablanca last night.
Ah!
said the inspector. Ah?
Torn from his dream he made an effort to wake up, to display his zeal, and added:
Is that so? Couldn’t he get through? Did he come back?
And in the dead darkness of the omnibus the answer came: No.
We waited to hear the rest, but no word sounded. And as the seconds fell it became more and more evident that that no
would be followed by no further word, was eternal and without appeal, that Lécrivain not only had not landed at Casablanca but would never again land anywhere.
And so, at daybreak on the morning of my first flight with the mails, I went through the sacred rites of the craft, and I felt the self-confidence oozing out of me as I stared through the windows at the macadam shining and reflecting back the street lights. Over the pools of water I could see great palms of wind running. And I thought: My first flight with the mails! Really, this is not my lucky day.
I raised my eyes and looked at the inspector. Would you call this bad weather?
I asked.
He threw a weary glance out of the window. Doesn’t prove anything,
he growled finally.
And I wondered how one could tell bad weather. The night before, with a single smile Guillaumet had wiped out all the evil omens with which the veterans overwhelmed us, but they came back into my memory. I feel sorry for the man who doesn’t know the whole line pebble by pebble, if he runs into a snowstorm. Oh, yes, I pity the fellow.
Our elders, who had their prestige to think of, had all bobbed their heads solemnly and looked at us with embarrassing sympathy, as if they were pitying a flock of condemned sheep.
For how many of us had this old omnibus served as refuge in its day? Sixty? Eighty? I looked about me. Luminous points glowed in the darkness. Cigarettes punctuated the humble meditations of worn old clerks. How many of us had they escorted through the rain on a journey from which there was no coming back?
I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. Their talk painted the walls of the dismal prison in which these men had locked themselves up. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny.
Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.
The squall has ceased to be a cause of my complaint. The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the stars.
Thus I went through my professional baptism and I began to fly the mails. For the most part the flights were without incident. Like sea-divers, we sank peacefully into the depths of our element.
Flying, in general, seemed to us easy. When the skies are filled with black vapors, when fog and sand and sea are confounded in a brew in which they become indistinguishable, when gleaming flashes wheel treacherously in these skyey swamps, the pilot purges himself of the phantoms at a single stroke. He lights his lamps. He brings sanity into his house as into a lonely cottage on a fearsome heath. And the crew travel a sort of submarine route in a lighted chamber.
Pilot, mechanic, and radio operator are shut up in what might be a laboratory. They are obedient to the play of dial-hands, not to the unrolling of the landscape. Out of doors the mountains are immersed in tenebrous darkness; but they are no longer mountains, they are invisible powers whose approach must be computed.
The operator sits in the light of his lamp, dutifully setting down figures; the mechanic ticks off points on his chart; the pilot swerves in response to the drift of the mountains as quickly as he sees that the summits he intends to pass on the left have deployed straight ahead of him in a silence and secrecy as of military preparations. And below on the ground the watchful radio men in their shacks take down submissively in their notebooks the dictation of their comrade in the air: 12:40 a.m. En route 230. All well.
So the crew fly on with no thought that they are in motion. Like night over the sea, they are very far from the earth, from towns, from trees. The motors fill the lighted chamber with a quiver that changes its substance. The clock ticks on. The dials, the radio lamps, the various hands and needles go through their invisible alchemy. From second to second these mysterious stirrings, a few muffled words, a concentrated tenseness, contribute to the end result. And when the hour is at hand the pilot may glue his forehead to the window with perfect assurance. Out of oblivion the gold has been smelted: there it gleams in the lights of the airport.
And yet we have all known flights when of a sudden, each for himself, it has seemed to us that we have crossed the border of the world of reality; when, only a couple of hours from port, we have felt ourselves more distant from it than we should feel if we were in India; when there has come a premonition of an incursion into a forbidden world whence it was going to be infinitely difficult to return.
Thus, when Mermoz first crossed the South Atlantic in a hydroplane, as day was dying he ran foul of the Black Hole region, off Africa. Straight ahead of him were the tails of tornadoes rising minute by minute gradually higher, rising as a wall is built; and then the night came down upon these preliminaries and swallowed them up; and when, an hour later, he slipped under the clouds, he came out into a fantastic kingdom.
Great black waterspouts had reared themselves seemingly in the immobility of temple pillars. Swollen at their tops, they were supporting the squat and lowering arch of the tempest, but through the rifts in the arch there fell slabs of light and the full moon sent her radiant beams between the pillars down upon the frozen tiles of the sea. Through these uninhabited ruins Mermoz made his way, gliding slantwise from one channel of light to the next, circling round those giant pillars in which there must have rumbled the upsurge of the sea, flying for four hours through these corridors of moonlight toward the exit from the temple. And this spectacle was so overwhelming that only after he had got through the Black Hole did Mermoz awaken to the fact that he had not been afraid.
I remember, for my part, another of those hours in which a pilot finds suddenly that he has slipped beyond the confines of this world. All that night the radio messages sent from the ports in the Sahara concerning our position had been inaccurate, and my radio operator, Néri, and I had been drawn out of our course. Suddenly, seeing the gleam of water at the bottom of a crevasse of fog, I tacked sharply in the direction of the coast; but it was by then impossible for us to say how long we had been flying towards the high seas. Nor were we certain of making the coast, for our fuel was probably low. And even so, once we had reached it we would still have to make port—after the moon had set.
We had no means of angular orientation, were already deafened, and were bit by bit growing blind. The moon like a pallid ember began to go out in the banks of fog. Overhead the sky was filling with clouds, and we flew thenceforth between cloud and fog in a world voided of all substance and all light. The ports that signaled us had given up trying to tell us where we were. No bearings, no bearings,
was all their message, for our voice reached them from everywhere and nowhere. With sinking hearts Néri and I leaned out, he on his side and I on mine, to see if anything, anything at all, was distinguishable in this void. Already our tired eyes were seeing things-errant signs, delusive flashes, phantoms.
And suddenly, when already we were in despair, low on the horizon a brilliant point was unveiled on our port bow. A wave of joy went through me. Néri leaned forward, and I could hear him singing. It could not but be the beacon of an airport, for after dark the whole Sahara goes black and forms a great dead expanse. That light twinkled for a space—and then went out! We had been steering for a star which was visible for a few minutes only, just before setting on the horizon between the layer of fog and the clouds.
Then other stars took up the game, and with a sort of dogged hope we set our course for each of them in turn. Each time that a light lingered a while, we performed the same crucial experiment. Néri would send his message to the airport at Cisneros: Beacon in view. Put out your light and flash three times.
And Cisneros would put out its beacon and flash three times while the hard light at which we gazed would not, incorruptible star, so much as wink. And despite our dwindling fuel we continued to nibble at the golden bait which each time seemed more surely the true light of a beacon, was each time a promise of a landing and of life—and we had each time to change our star.
And with that we knew ourselves to be lost in interplanetary space among a thousand inaccessible planets, we who sought only the one veritable planet, our own, that planet on which alone we should find our familiar countryside, the houses of our friends, our treasures.
On which alone we should find . . . Let me draw the picture that took shape before my eyes. It will seem to you childish; but even in the midst of danger a man retains his human concerns. I was thirsty and I was hungry. If we did find Cisneros we should re-fuel and carry on to Casablanca, and there we should come down in the cool of daybreak, free to idle the hours away. Néri and I would go into town. We would go to a little pub already open despite the early hour. Safe and sound, Néri and I would sit down at table and laugh at the night of danger as we ate our warm rolls and drank our bowls of coffee and hot milk. We would receive this matutinal gift at the hands of life. Even as an old peasant woman recognizes her God in a painted image, in a childish medal, in a chaplet, so life would speak to us in its humblest language in order that we understand. The joy of living, I say, was summed up for me in the remembered sensation of that first burning and aromatic swallow, that mixture of milk and coffee and bread by which men hold communion with tranquil pastures, exotic plantations, and golden harvests, communion with the earth. Amidst all these stars there was but one that could make itself significant for us by composing this aromatic bowl that was its daily gift at dawn. And from that earth of men, that earth docile to the reaping of grain and the harvesting of the grape, bearing its rivers asleep in their fields, its villages clinging to their hillsides, our ship was separated by astronomical distances. All the treasures