Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Read Free Book Online Page B

venture to send his planes into the depth of night. And now, with few to back him, disowned by nearly all, he plowed a lonely furrow.
    Rivière rang up to learn the latest messages from the planes in flight.

XII
    Now the Patagonia mail was entering the storm and Fabien abandoned all idea of circumventing it; it was too widespread for that, he reckoned, for the vista of lightning flashes led far inland, exposing battlement on battlement of clouds. He decided to try passing below it, ready to beat a retreat if things took a bad turn.
    He read his altitude, five thousand five hundred feet, and pressed the controls with his palms to bring it down. The engine started thudding violently, setting all the plane aquiver. Fabien corrected the gliding angle approximately, verifying on the map the height of the hills, some sixteen hundred feet. To keep a safety margin he determined to fly at a trifle above two thousand, staking his altitude as a gambler risks his fortune.
    An eddy dragged him down, making the plane tremble still more harshly and he felt the threat of unseen avalanches that toppled all about him He dreamt an instant of retreat and its guerdon of a hundred thousand stars, but did not shift his course by one degree.
    Fabien weighed his chances; probably this was just a local storm, as Trelew, the next halt, was signaling a sky only three-quarters overcast. A bare twenty minutes more of solid murk and he would be through with it. Nevertheless the pilot felt uneasy. Leaning to his left, to windward, he sought to catch those vague gleams which, even in darkest nights, flit here and there. But even those vagrant gleams were gone; at most there lingered patches in the mass of shadow where the night seemed less opaque, or was it only that his eyes were growing strained?
    The wireless operator handed him a slip of paper.
    â€œWhere are we?”
    Fabien would have given much to know. “Can’t say exactly,” he answered. “We are flying by compass across a storm.”
    He leaned down again. The flame from the exhaust was getting on his nerves. There it was, clinging to the motor like a spray of fireflowers, so pale it seemed that moonlight would have quelled it, but, in this nothingness, engulfing all the visible world. He watched it streaming stiffly out into the wind, like a torch flame.
    Every thirty seconds Fabien bent down into the cockpit to check the gyroscope and compass. He dared not light the dim red lamps which
would have dazzled his eyes for some moments, but the luminous dial hands were ceaselessly emitting their pale and starry radiance. And in all those needles and printed figures the pilot found an illusive reassurance, as in the cabin of a ship swept by the waves. For, like a very sea of strange fatality, the night was rolling up against him with all its rocks and reefs and wreckage.
    â€œWhere are we?” the operator asked again.
    Fabien drew himself up and, leaning to the left, resumed his tremendous vigil. He had no notion left how many hours more and what efforts would be needed to deliver him from fettering darkness. Would he ever come clear, he wondered, for he was staking his life on this little slip of dirty, crumpled paper, which he unfolded and re-read a thousand times to nurse his hopes:
Trelew. Sky three-quarters overcast. Westerly breeze.
If there still remained a clear patch over Trelew, he would presently glimpse its lights across a cloud rift. Unless....
    That promise of a faint gleam far ahead beckoned him on; but, to make sure, he scribbled a message to the radio operator. “Don’t know if I can get through. Ask if the weather’s holding out behind.”
    The answer appalled him.
    â€œCommodoro reports: Impossible return here. Storm.”
    He was beginning to measure this unforeseen offensive, launched from the Cordillera toward the sea. Before he could make them the storm would have burst upon the cities.
    â€œGet the San Antonio weather