“It might be Lilliput,” said Reese, aloud, bending his helmeted head over the inch-wide rim of aluminium that separated him from space. The strangeness of sheer height and aloofness had written awe on his face. He lifted his eyes from the Atlantic to the curved walls of sky, dark blue with the thinness of the air, dazzling like steel with the resplendence of untempered sunshine, which curved downward all around him. He was as though suspended in the monstrous metal reflector of a monstrous electric light; dizzying, blazing distance was all around him. “God!” he muttered; “isn’t this—” There was a catch of awe and rapture in his voice—“isn’t this tremendous! And lonely! A man on a mountain-peak wouldn’t be half so much alone.”
Behind the glass of his goggles his wide, hazel-colored eyes shone with a dull excitement, like that following the first exhilaration of champagne. His rapid ascent, the thin, icy air, the powerful hum of the muffled motor, the blazing sunshine, the voice and fingers of the wind, the sweep of his winged machine obeying the circular blur that showed the tractor’s power at its head, the invisible supporting strength that thrilled along the steel nerves of the great bird into his hands—all these new and strong forces registered themselves on the brain of the man, doubled the time of his heart-beats, made him quiver more with excitement than with the cold that suggested itself despite his furs. There was no fear on his keen face; rather exultation, triumph, delight in the presence of danger. A strong swimmer might have struck out toward sirens on their rocks with such an expression of eager, abandoned joy.
“‘They shall mount up with wings as eagles!’” he chanted somewhat wildly, glad of the sound of his voice in the strange emptiness and silence of the place. His eyes wandered along the dazzling, blue-black horizon to a blazing mass of snow-like mist that was forming on the seaward side. “I wish I could go to sleep—like a frigate-bird on the wing,” he finished inconsequently.
He had got little sleep the night before, the nearness of his first real flight, his first unattended trip toward the sun, had been too poignant. From his first lesson in “grass-cutting,” with an instructor in the seat behind him, he had dreamed of this; height and distance allured him as by some affinity with his nature, with the very blood in his veins. His privateer ancestors of 1812, his balloonist great-uncle, his grandfather who had been a naval officer, had bequeathed him their love of free spaces and adventure. The care of his father, a well-to-do professor in a technical school, to bring the boy up to the teaching profession had not survived young Reese’s first sight of an aëroplane. The professor bowed to the inevitable; John Faraday Reese gave up higher mathematics to adventure on the highways of the sky.
As the machine completed its three-mile circle and came once more up into the wind, Reese straightened it out again, and pulled back a little on the yoke that worked the big double elevator in the tail. The great wings turned upward again, soaring. Playing the controls as instinctively as though the machine had been a part of him, the driver kept his eyes on the lethargic needle of the barograph. From beneath drooping eyelids he watched it crawl upward over the lined paper strip. Twelve thousand five hundred, twelve thousand seven hundred fifty, thirteen thousand, thirteen thousand two hundred feet.
Despite the sharp angle at which the big bird poised, the ascent was growing more gradual; the thinned air offered less grip for the tractor, less support for the wings. To increase the power of the motor, Reese cut out the muffler. The rapid musketry of the exhaust broke out, strangely sharpened and clamorous in the attenuated air. With something like a shudder, he threw over the lever that muffled the engine. His nerves were on edge; the strange sound hurt. The barograph marked thirteen thousand six hundred feet.
Still they climbed, enveloped in a blaze of sunshine that was to the tempered sunlight of the earth’s surface as diamonds to glass. Despite the zero air, Reese’s temples inside his padded leather helmet were bathed in sweat. He was panting, and fine, red lines appeared on the smarting surface of his eyeballs. Below the mask of his goggles his face was drawn into deep, straining lines of exultant determination.
“Up we go!” he shouted. His voice seemed smothered in a vacuum, but he disregarded the strangeness. “Sixteen thousand and a world’s record, or bust!”
He glanced again over the quivering rim of the car. A fine white mist, a mist that gave back the blazing sunshine like cloth of spun-glass, had shut out the earth. It was as though a cover had been put over the mouth of the tremendous reflector inside of which he was buzzing upward, smaller than a midge in the globe of an arclight. The very air seemed to turn to flames and ice. A great wave of melancholy gathered, rose, and broke over him; he was alone in an inhuman world that blazed and swayed, that burned and froze, that had no stability, that allowed him air only in searing little gasps.
“Nevertheless,” he muttered, biting at his hardened nether-lip—“nevertheless, up we go!”