Back in the air, Amelia stretched the sectional map across her knees and studied the way ahead. Singapore lay on an island to which pointed the long 900-mile finger of the Malay Peninsula. To reach it, she would have to cut across the Gulf of Siam, then proceed on a course east of the Malay coast, and finally head directly south.
She looked out from the cockpit. The day was clear and the visibility unlimited. She found it hard to believe that she was flying over the fabled world she had so often set out for, riding the old buggy in the Atchison barn, or lying on the floor in the parlor looking at one of Grandfather Otis’s big geography books. She loved the sound of the names, Siam and Cambodia, and she picked out others at random from the map—Bang Saphan, Lem Tane, Koh Phratnog. Yet there were two of them below: Siam to the right, Cambodia to the left.
Nevertheless, Amelia shook her head, as she had failed to see Timbuktu, so had she missed seeing the famous Taj Mahal in Negra, which had not been far off the Karachi-Allahabad leg. It, too, would have to wait for another time. Now, there was too little time and too much to see.
She now followed a valley across the mountains, then swung down the western coast from Alor Star in Malay. The clouds over the peaks were beginning to grow: cumulus into cumulo-nimbus, cumulo-nimbus into great thunderheads.
A deep green jungle unfolded below, with an occasional scar that marked the cut of a road across the undulating hills and flatlands.
After six hours of flying Amelia sighted Singapore. Letting down from altitude, she passed over countless ships in the great sprawling harbor, then continued over the vast city to the airport. At 5:25 P.M. the Electra touched down.
Amelia and Fred had dinner with the American consul general and his wife. After dinner the fliers begged to be excused, and turned in. At 3:00 A.M. they were up and on their way back to the airport, eager to get on to their next stop, Java, which lay on the other side of a third crossing of the equator. It was the morning of June 22.
The Electra soared into the air. Over the sea along the coast of Sumatra, then across the southeast point of the island, Amelia guided her plane into the world down under of the Southern Hemisphere.
In quick succession she noted the jungle and swamp of a long chain of islands; then sudden and abrupt, the volcanic mountains of Java, imperious and proud, which rose out of the mist to dominate the surrounding sea below them. Like suckling pigs, tiny islands lay along the mother shore for their nourishment.
Amelia landed at Bandung and taxied the plane to the hangar. According to plan, the Electra was scheduled for a complete going over. The plane in the hands of the mechanics, Amelia and Fred decided to get a closer look down into one of the volcanoes they had flown over.