Flight to Arras by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Read Free Book Online

turned the matter over in his mind.
    â€œIf I had known, I could have crawled back into the cockpit. The flames were not so high. I lay there on the wing, I don’t know how long. I had stabilized the plane at an angle before crawling out. The going was smooth, the wind was bearable, and I felt fairly comfortable. I must have been out on that wing for some time. I didn’t know what to do.”
    Not that Sagon had been faced with insoluble problems. He thought himself alone on board. The plane was burning. The fighters were still after it and spattering it with bullets, What Sagon was telling us was that he had felt no desire of any kind. He had felt nothing. He had time on his hands. He was floating in a sort of infinite leisure. And point by point I recognized the extraordinary sensation that now and then accompanies the imminence of death—a feeling of unexpected leisure, absolutely the contrary of the picture-book notion of breathless haste. Sagon had lain there on his wing, a creature flung out of the dimension of time.
    â€œAnd then,” he said, “I jumped. I made a bad job of it. I could feel myself twisting in the air and hesitated to pull the cord, thinking I might get tangled up in the ’chute, I waited until I had straightened out. I waited quite a long time.”
    What Sagon really remembered of his whole mishap, from beginning to end, was waiting. Waiting for the flames to rise higher. Then waiting on the wing for Heaven knows what. And finally, falling freely through the air, still waiting.
    This was Sagon himself who was doing these things—actually a Sagon more rudimentary, more simple than the Sagon I know: a Sagon a little perplexed, bored and slightly impatient as he felt himself drop into an abyss.

VIII
    We had been living for two hours at the centre of an external pressure reduced to two thirds of normal. The crew were being gradually used up. We exchanged hardly a word. Once or twice, very cautiously, I tried to work my rudder. I was not obstinate about it. Each time the same sensation, the same feeling of a gentle exhaustion, had come over me.
    Dutertre, at work with his camera, was careful to let me know in plenty of time when his photography required that I bank. I would do the best I could with such control of the wheel as was still left to me. I would tilt the plane and pull towards me; and in a dozen or twenty separate efforts I would set her where Dutertre wanted her.
    â€œAltitude?”
    â€œThirty-three thousand seven.”
    I was still thinking of Sagon. Man is always himself. In myself I have never met another than myself. Sagon knew only Sagon. He who dies, dies as he was. In the death of an ordinary miner, it is an ordinary miner who dies. Where is it to be found—that haggard dementia that writers have invented to fascinate us with?
    I saw once in Spain a man hauled up, after several days of excavation, out of the cellar of a house that had been destroyed by a bomb. He was blinking, for the daylight hurt his eyes; and men were holding him up, for he was tottering.
    A crowd stood round him in silence and with what seemed to me a sudden timidity. This man, resuscitated almost from the beyond, still covered in the rubble in which he had been buried, half stupefied by suffocation and hunger, was like some dim monster. When someone grew bold enough to ask him questions, and to the questions he lent a kind of pallid attention, the timidity of the crowd changed to uneasiness.
    Those round him tried to unlock his secret with bungling keys—for who is there can formulate the right question? They asked him what he had felt, what he had thought of, what he had done in that grave. They flung bridges at random across an abyss, like men seeking to reach the night of the mind of one blind and deaf and dumb, and bring him help. But when, finally, he was able to answer, what he said was, “Yes, I heard a long tearing sound.” Or he said, “I was