I did my utmost to check it, but it got worse and worse. From one side to the other the machine swayed, like a great pendulum, swinging faster and faster and each time through a greater distance. For some time I managed to keep the swerves within the limits of the track without fouling the ruts and the rocks at the side, but it was no use; I saw a fearful crash coming.
The wobble developed at an alarming speed; no doubt the heavy baggage on the carrier helped. At the end of each oscillation the machine was at a still greater, a still more ridiculous angle to the ground. The front wheel caught something. It had to come sooner or later. With a wild lurch we crashed down on the loose rocks and boulders that bordered the trail. Our momentum was soon absorbed owing to the rough nature of the rocks and boulders aforesaid.
"Here endeth the trip to the coast. Farewell, Lizzie; it might have happened sooner, you know, old girl." That's what I was saying to myself as I struggled from underneath her remains!
[CHAPTER XIX]
THE MOHAVE DESERT
I have often thought there must be a guardian angel watching over mad motor-cyclists. Certainly in my case some theory of that sort is necessary to account for the almost entire immunity from personal damage that I have always experienced when fate has led me into crashes of all kinds. At one time and another I have performed wonderful acrobatic feats after a bad skid or a sudden encounter in the dark with a stray horse or a flock of sheep. By all the laws of nature and common sense, I should long since have ceased to labour on this earthly plane. Instead of that, I continue to flourish like the green bay tree, the terror of the country I inhabit, and the bane of the Company that has the misfortune to insure my machines!
Thus it happened that when I extricated myself from the debris, I found myself still sound in wind and limb. Apart from one finger having been crushed between the handle and the final boulder, and the absence of one or two square inches of good epidermis here and there, I had nothing whatever to complain of.
Lizzie, however, wore a forlorn look. Her left handlebar was badly bent and most of the controls and projections on her starboard side were either bent backwards or swept clean away. The stand, a heavy steel structure strong enough to make a suspension bridge, had broken away altogether, and had not the footboard been of the collapsing type, it would undoubtedly have shared the same fate.
An hour of doctoring, with frequent applications of wire and insulation tape, and Lizzie was going again. I was relieved in the extreme to find that after all there was a chance of continuing to the coast under her own power. My forefinger pained a trifle, and I could not bear to bend it. I believe always in leaving Nature to carry out her own repairs—it saves a lot of time and bother and generally gets the job finished much quicker in the end, so I spent no time in doctoring it.