An Englishman Looks at the World | Page 5

is so. I suppose in
such matters I am neither exceptionally steady-headed nor is my head
exceptionally given to swimming. I can stand on the edge of cliffs of a
thousand feet or so and look down, but I can never bring myself right
up to the edge nor crane over to look to the very bottom. I should want
to lie down to do that. And the other day I was on that Belvedere place
at the top of the Rotterdam sky-scraper, a rather high wind was blowing,
and one looks down through the chinks between the boards one stands
on upon the heads of the people in the streets below; I didn't like it. But
this morning I looked directly down on a little fleet of fishing boats
over which we passed, and on the crowds assembling on the beach, and
on the bathers who stared up at us from the breaking surf, with an
entirely agreeable exaltation. And Eastbourne, in the early morning
sunshine, had all the brightly detailed littleness of a town viewed from
high up on the side of a great mountain.
When Mr. Grahame-White told me we were going to plane down I will
confess I tightened my hold on the sides of the car and prepared for
something like the down-going sensation of a switchback railway on a
larger scale. Just for a moment there was that familiar feeling of
something pressing one's heart up towards one's shoulders, and one's
lower jaw up into its socket and of grinding one's lower teeth against
the upper, and then it passed. The nose of the car and all the machine
was slanting downwards, we were gliding quickly down, and yet there
was no feeling that one rushed, not even as one rushes in coasting a hill
on a bicycle. It wasn't a tithe of the thrill of those three descents one
gets on the great mountain railway in the White City. There one gets a
disagreeable quiver up one's backbone from the wheels, and a real
sense of falling.
It is quite peculiar to flying that one is incredulous of any collision.
Some time ago I was in a motor-car that ran over and killed a small dog,
and this wretched little incident has left an open wound upon my nerves.
I am never quite happy in a car now; I can't help keeping an
apprehensive eye ahead. But you fly with an exhilarating assurance that
you cannot possibly run over anything or run into anything--except the
land or the sea, and even those large essentials seem a beautifully safe

distance away.
I had heard a great deal of talk about the deafening uproar of the engine.
I counted a headache among my chances. There again reason reinforced
conjecture. When in the early morning Mr. Travers came from
Brighton in this Farman in which I flew I could hear the hum of the
great insect when it still seemed abreast of Beachy Head, and a good
two miles away. If one can hear a thing at two miles, how much the
more will one not hear it at a distance of two yards? But at the risk of
seeming too contented for anything I will assert I heard that noise no
more than one hears the drone of an electric ventilator upon one's table.
It was only when I came to speak to Mr. Grahame-White, or he to me,
that I discovered that our voices had become almost infinitesimally
small.
And so it was I went up into the air at Eastbourne with the impression
that flying was still an uncomfortable experimental, and slightly heroic
thing to do, and came down to the cheerful gathering crowd upon the
sands again with the knowledge that it is a thing achieved for everyone.
It will get much cheaper, no doubt, and much swifter, and be improved
in a dozen ways--we must get self-starting engines, for example, for
both our aeroplanes and motor-cars--but it is available to-day for
anyone who can reach it. An invalid lady of seventy could have
enjoyed all that I did if only one could have got her into the passenger's
seat. Getting there was a little difficult, it is true; the waterplane was
out in the surf, and I was carried to it on a boatman's back, and then had
to clamber carefully through the wires, but that is a matter of detail.
This flying is indeed so certain to become a general experience that I
am sure that this description will in a few years seem almost as quaint
as if I had set myself to record the fears and sensations of my First Ride
in a Wheeled Vehicle. And I suspect that learning to control a Farman
waterplane now is probably not