Fifty or sixty aeroplanes were collected in the shed like a flock of grasshoppers. The grasshopper has the same enormous thighs, the same little boatshaped body resting between its thighs, and if touched with a blade of grass, he, too, springs high into the air.

The mechanics ran the aeroplane out onto the turf; and Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood, at whose invitation we had come to make our first flight, stooped down and made the engine roar. A thousand pens have described the sensation of leaving earth; ‘The earth drops from you,’ they say; one sits still and the world has fallen. It is true that the earth fell, but what was stranger was the downfall of the sky. One was not prepared within a moment of taking off to be immersed in it, alone with it, to be in the thick of it. Habit has fixed the earth immovably in the centre of the imagination like a hard ball; everything is made to the scale of houses and streets. And as one rises up into the sky, as the sky pours down over one, this little hard granular knob, with its carvings and frettings, dissolves, crumbles, loses its domes, its pinnacles, its firesides, its habits, and one becomes conscious of being a little mammal, hot-blooded, hard boned, with a clot of red blood in one’s body, trespassing up here in a fine air; repugnant to it, unclean, anti-pathetic. Vertebrae, ribs, entrails, and red blood belong to the earth; to the world of Brussels sprouts and sheep going awkwardly on four pointed legs. Here are winds tapering, vanishing, and the untimed manœuvre of clouds, and nothing permanent, but vanishing and melting at the touch of each other without concussion, and the fields that with us are meted into yards and grow punctually wheat and barley are here made and remade perpetually with flourishes of rain and flights of hail and spaces tranquil as the deep sea, and then all is chop and change, breeze and motion. Yet, though we flew through territories with never a hedge or stick to divide them, nameless, unowned, so inveterately anthropocentric is the mind that instinctively the aeroplane becomes a boat and we are sailing towards a harbour and there we shall be received by hands that lift themselves from swaying garments; welcoming, accepting. Wraiths (our aspirations and imaginations) have their home here; and in spite of our vertebrae, ribs, and entrails, we are also vapour and air, and shall be united.

Here, Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood, by a touch on the lever, turned the nose of the Moth downwards. Nothing more fantastic could be imagined. Houses, streets, banks, public buildings, and habits and mutton and Brussels sprouts had been swept into long spirals and curves of pink and purple like that a wet brush makes when it sweeps mounds of paint together. One could see through the Bank of England; all the business houses were transparent; the River Thames was as the Romans saw it, as paleolithic man saw it, at dawn from a hill shaggy with wood, with the rhinoceros digging his horn into the roots of rhododendrons. So immortally fresh and virginal London looked and England was earth merely, merely the world. Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood kept his finger still on the lever which turns the plane downwards. A spark glinted on a greenhouse. There rose a dome, a spire, a factory-chimney, a gasometer. Civilization in short emerged; hands and minds worked again; and the centuries vanished and the wild rhinoceros was chased out of sight for ever. Still we descended. Here was a garden; here a football field. But no human being was yet visible; England looked like a ship that sails unmanned. Perhaps the race was dead, and we should board the world like that ship’s company who found the ship sailing with all her sails set, and the kettle on the fire, but not a soul on board. Yet a spot down there, something squat and minute, might be a horse—or a man. … But Hopgood touched another lever and we rose again like a spirit shaking contamination from its wings, shaking gasometers and factories and football fields from its feet.

It was a moment of renunciation. We prefer the other we seemed to say. Wraiths and sand dunes and mist; imagination; this we prefer to the mutton and the entrails. It was the idea of death that now suggested itself; not being received and welcomed; not immortality but extinction. For the clouds above were black. Across them there passed in single file a flight of gulls, livid white against the leaden background, holding on their way with the authority of owners, having rights, and means of communication unknown to us, an alien, a privileged race. But where there are gulls only, life is not. Life ends; life is dowsed in that cloud as lamps are dowsed with a wet sponge. That extinction has become now desirable. For it was odd in this voyage to note how blindly the tide of the soul and its desires rolled this way and that, carrying consciousness like a feather on the top, marking the direction, not controlling it. And so we swept on now up to death.

Hopgood’s head cased in leather with a furry rim to it had the semblance of a winged pilot, of Charon’s head, remorselessly conducting his passenger to the wet sponge which annihilates. For the mind (one can but repeat these things without claiming sense or truth for them—merely that they were such) is convinced in its own fastness, in its solitude, of extinction, and what is more, proud of it, as if it deserved extinction, extinction profited it more and were more desirable than prolongation on other terms by other wills. ‘Charon’, the mind prayed to the back of Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood, ‘carry me on; thrust me deep, deep; till every glimmer of light in me, of heat of knowledge, even the tingling I feel in my toes is dulled; after all this living, all this scratching and tingling of sensation, that too—darkness, dullness, the black wet—will be also a sensation.’ And such is the incurable vanity of the human mind that the cloud, the wet sponge that was to extinguish, became, now that one thought of a contact with one’s own mind, a furnace in which we roared up, and our death was a fire; brandished at the summit of life, many tongued, blood red, visible over land and sea. Extinction! The word is consummation.

Now we were in the skirts of the cloud and the wings of the aeroplane were spattered with hail; hail shot past silver and straight like the flash of steel railway lines. Innumerable arrows shot at us, down the august avenue of our approach.

Then Charon turned his head with its fringe of fur and laughed at us. It was an ugly face, with high cheek bones, and little deep sunk eyes, and all down one cheek was a crease where he had been cut and stitched together. Perhaps he weighed fifteen stone; he was oak limbed and angular. But for all this nothing now remained of Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood but a flame such as one sees blown thin and furtive at a street corner; a flame that for all its agility can hardly escape death. Such was the Flight-Lieutenant become; and ourselves too, so that the clinging hands, the embraces, the companionship of those about to die together was vanished; there was no flesh. However, just as one comes to the end of an avenue of trees and finds a pond with ducks on it, and nothing but lead-coloured water, so we came through the avenue of hail and out into a pool so still, so quiet, with haze above and cloud below it, so that we seemed to float as a duck floats on a pond. But the haze above us was compact of whiteness. As colour runs to the end of a paint brush, so the blue of the sky had run into one blob beneath it. It was white above us. And now the ribs and the entrails of the sprout-eating mammal began to be frozen, pulverized, frozen to lightness and whiteness of this spectral universe, and nothingness. For no clouds voyaged and lumbered up there; with light fondling them and masses breaking off their slopes or again towering and swelling. Here was no feather, no crease to break the steep wall ascending for ever up, for ever and ever.

And those yellowish lights, Hopgood and oneself, were put out effectively as the sun blanches the flame on a coal. No sponge effaced us, with its damp snout. Nothingness was poured down upon us like a mound of white sand. Then as if some part of us kept its ponderosity, down we fell into fleeciness, substance, and colour; all the colours of pounded plums and dolphins and blankets and seas and rain clouds crushed together, staining—purple, black, steel, all this soft ripeness seethed about us, and the eye felt as a fish feels when it slips from the rock into the depths of the sea.

For a time we were muffled in the clouds. Then the fairy earth appeared, lying far, far below, a mere slice or knife blade of colour floating. It rose towards us with extreme speed, broadening and lengthening; forests appeared on it and seas; and then again an uneasy dark blot which soon began to be pricked with spires and blown into bubbles and domes. Nearer and nearer we came together and had again the whole of civilization spread beneath us, silent, empty, like a demonstration made for our instruction; the river with the steamers that bring coal and iron; the churches, the factories, the railways. Nothing moved; nobody worked the machine, until in some field on the outskirts of London one saw a dot actually and certainly move. Though the dot was the size of a bluebottle and its movement minute, reason insisted that it was a horse and it was galloping, but all speed and size were so reduced that the speed of the horse seemed very, very slow, and its size minute. Now, however, there were often movements in the streets, as of sliding and stopping; and then gradually the vast creases of the stuff beneath began moving, and one saw in the creases millions of insects moving. In another second they became men, men of business, in the heart of the white city buildings.

Through a pair of Zeiss glasses one could indeed now see the tops of the heads of separate men and could distinguish a bowler from a cap, and could thus be certain of social grades—which was an employer, which was a working man. And one had to change perpetually air values into land values. There were blocks in the city of traffic sometimes almost a foot long; these had to be translated into eleven or twelve Rolls Royces in a row with city magnates waiting furious; and one had to add up the fury of the magnates; and say—even though it was all silent and the block was only a few inches in length, how scandalous the control of the traffic is in the City of London.

But with a turn of his wrist Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood flew over the poor quarters, and there through the Zeiss glasses one could see people looking up at the noise of the aeroplane, and could judge the expression on their faces. It was not one that one sees ordinarily. It was complex. ‘And I have to scrub the steps,’ it seemed to say grudgingly. All the same, they saluted, they sent us greeting; they were capable of flight. And after all, here the head was turned down again and the scrubbing brush was grasped tightly, to fall on the pavement wouldn’t be nice. And they shook their heads; but they looked up at us again. But further on, over Oxford Street perhaps it was, nobody noticed us at all, but went on jostling each other with some furious desire absorbing them, for a sight of something (there was a yellowish flash as we passed overhead) in a shop window. Further, by Bayswater perhaps, where the press was thinner, a face, a figure, something odd in hat or person suddenly caught one’s eye. And then it was odd how one became resentful of all the flags and surfaces and of the innumerable windows symmetrical as avenues, symmetrical as forest groves, and wished for some opening, and to push indoors and be rid of surfaces. Up in Bayswater a door did open, and instantly, of course, there appeared a room, incredibly small, of course, and ridiculous in its attempt to be separate and itself, and then it was a woman’s face, young, perhaps, at any rate with a black cloak and a red hat that made the furniture—here a bowl, there a sideboard with apples on it, cease to be interesting because the power that buys a mat, or sets two colours together, became perceptible, as one may say that the haze over an electric fire becomes perceptible. Everything had changed its values seen from the air. Personality was outside the body, abstract. And one wished to be able to animate the heart, the legs, the arms with it, to do which it would be necessary to be there, so as to collect; so as to give up this arduous game, as one flies through the air, of assembling things that lie on the surface.

And then the field curved round us, and we were caught in an eddy of green cloth and white racing palings that flew round us like tape, and touched earth and went at an enormous speed, pitching, bumping upon a rocky surface, hard curves, after the plumes of air. We had landed, and it was over.

As a matter of fact, the flight had not begun; for when Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood stooped and made the engine roar, he had found a defect of some sort in the machine, and raising his head, he had said very sheepishly, ‘’Fraid it’s no go today.’

So we had not flown after all.