Amelia eased back on the stick and climbed to 12,000 feet. She leveled off. She looked out the narrow windshield to the right. The sun, beginning to set in the west, sprayed out in a multicolored fan of gold, yellow, orange, and red. This was beauty, and adventure: the excitement and romance of flight. She looked quickly across the instruments, then out the other side of the windshield. The moon, like a disc of butter in whipped potatoes, sat on the top of a bank of clouds.
The nose of the plane felt a little heavy against the stick. She reached down and rolled in a little trim. She then held the wings straight and level, and trimmed the rudder against the torque of the propeller. The turn-and-bank indicator responded promptly: needle and ball aligned in the center of the instrument. The steady rhythm of the motor was like another heart; and the wings and fuselage were like extensions of her arms and body and legs. She was one with her plane.
10. Other Atlantics
“If you follow the inner desire of your heart,” she had said in a magazine article, “the incidentals will take care of themselves.” For four long years she had waited to justify herself to herself. She wanted to prove that she deserved at least a small fraction of all the nice things people had been saying about her as a flier. She had the credit, to spilling and overflowing, for already having flown this ocean; she now wanted to make the credit good by making a large deposit, by flying the Atlantic alone.
“Illogical?” She tried to explain with reasons from her heart. “Perhaps. Most of the things we want are illogical!”
Under the left wing she watched a ship knifing slowly through the water toward Newfoundland. She reached for the light toggle and blinked her navigation lights. There was no answer from the ship.
Amelia swallowed. Her mouth was dry. She reached down for a can of tomato juice, punched a hole through the top with a screw driver, and inserted a straw. She sipped slowly, letting the juice moisten her tongue and the inside of her mouth, then she swallowed a mouthful.
“Adventure,” she had always felt, “is worth while in itself.” Even when she was a little girl in Kansas, playing with her sister Muriel and her cousin Lucy Challiss, she had often gone to play “bogey” in the barn in back of the house in Atchison. The three girls would sit in the old buggy. Amelia would pick up the mildewed whip and crack it over the heads of the imaginary horses. They would ride wildly over a cobbled road, the buggy swaying. The horses galloped; the girls were in a hurry to get to Vienna. A knight in shining armor came riding out of the woods—toward them.
“Who’s that?” Lucy shrieked.
“Dispatches, Sir Knight!” Amelia shouted at the man on horseback; she was not afraid. “For the Congress of Vienna of Treves, in favor of the Holy Grail.” Undaunted, she continued, “Crusade about to start—unless we get through, the Pagan may prevail!”