An Englishman Looks at the World | Page 4

soared up, came back over the land, circled higher, planed
steeply down to the water, and I landed with the conviction that I had
had only the foretaste of a great store of hitherto unsuspected pleasures.
At the first chance I will go up again, and I will go higher and further.
This experience has restored all the keenness of my ancient interest in
flying, which had become a little fagged and flat by too much hearing
and reading about the thing and not enough participation. Sixteen years
ago, in the days of Langley and Lilienthal, I was one of the few
journalists who believed and wrote that flying was possible; it affected
my reputation unfavourably, and produced in the few discouraged
pioneers of those days a quite touching gratitude. Over my mantel as I
write hangs a very blurred and bad but interesting photograph that
Professor Langley sent me sixteen years ago. It shows the flight of the
first piece of human machinery heavier than air that ever kept itself up
for any length of time. It was a model, a little affair that would not have
lifted a cat; it went up in a spiral and came down unsmashed, bringing
back, like Noah's dove, the promise of tremendous things.
That was only sixteen years ago, and it is amusing to recall how
cautiously even we out-and-out believers did our prophesying. I was
quite a desperate fellow; I said outright that in my lifetime we should
see men flying. But I qualified that by repeating that for many years to
come it would be an enterprise only for quite fantastic daring and skill.
We conjured up stupendous difficulties and risks. I was deeply
impressed and greatly discouraged by a paper a distinguished
Cambridge mathematician produced to show that a flying machine was
bound to pitch fearfully, that as it flew on its pitching must increase
until up went its nose, down went its tail, and it fell like a knife. We

exaggerated every possibility of instability. We imagined that when the
aeroplane wasn't "kicking up ahind and afore" it would be heeling over
to the lightest side wind. A sneeze might upset it. We contrasted our
poor human equipment with the instinctive balance of a bird, which has
had ten million years of evolution by way of a start....
The waterplane in which I soared over Eastbourne this morning with
Mr. Grahame-White was as steady as a motor-car running on asphalt.
Then we went on from those anticipations of swaying insecurity to
speculations about the psychological and physiological effects of flying.
Most people who look down from the top of a cliff or high tower feel
some slight qualms of dread, many feel a quite sickening dread. Even if
men struggled high into the air, we asked, wouldn't they be smitten up
there by such a lonely and reeling dismay as to lose all self-control?
And, above all, wouldn't the pitching and tossing make them quite
horribly sea-sick?
I have always been a little haunted by that last dread. It gave a little
undertow of funk to the mood of lively curiosity with which I got
aboard the waterplane this morning--that sort of faint, thin funk that so
readily invades one on the verge of any new experience; when one tries
one's first dive, for example, or pushes off for the first time down an ice
run. I thought I should very probably be sea-sick--or, to be more
precise, air-sick; I thought also that I might be very giddy, and that I
might get thoroughly cold and uncomfortable None of those things
happened.
I am still in a state of amazement at the smooth steadfastness of the
motion. There is nothing on earth to compare with that, unless--and that
I can't judge--it is an ice yacht travelling on perfect ice. The finest
motor-car in the world on the best road would be a joggling, quivering
thing beside it.
To begin with, we went out to sea before the wind, and the plane would
not readily rise. We went with an undulating movement, leaping with a
light splashing pat upon the water, from wave to wave. Then we came
about into the wind and rose, and looking over I saw that there were no
longer those periodic flashes of white foam. I was flying. And it was as
still and steady as dreaming. I watched the widening distance between
our floats and the waves. It wasn't by any means a windless day; there
was a brisk, fluctuating breeze blowing out of the north over the downs.

It seemed hardly to affect our flight at all.
And as for the giddiness of looking down, one does not feel it at all. It
is difficult to explain why this should be so, but it