The Lonely Sea and the Sky (14 page)

  The track came down from Amman to the North, and I was to strike it 20 miles east of Ziza. I concentrated on watching the ground, but after 20 miles I had seen no sign of a track, and on looking round could see nothing in any direction but brown sand and desert, and a few hills far away on the northern horizon. Every mile I covered without spotting signs of anything I grew more anxious. Some 33 miles from Ziza I was wondering if I must turn back and start afresh, when I suddenly sighted a square building. I turned at once and flew over it. With no windows or doors, it was like a solid block of stone. I circled it, and found some tail skid marks in the sand but I could not find the letter C which should identify the first landing-ground. I found two wheel tracks, and began following them. I had to twist about to follow the faint tracks, and concentrated on keeping them in sight. The landing-ground D ought to have shown up 73 miles out, but there were no signs of it. After 85 miles and still no sign, I began to get worried. I had to determine the direction of those tracks. This was difficult, because the aeroplane was drifting hard to the left or north in the strong southerly wind, and the track was swinging from side to side through an arc of sixty degrees. I decided that we were flying in the direction of 110 degrees. 'Good Lord,' I thought, 'I should be headed 84 degrees. I'm probably headed for Mecca !'

  I told myself that I must keep cool, for a desert was no place in which to lose one's head. I began reasoning things out as I flew along, and finally reckoned that I must be 30 miles south of the correct route. I ought to retrace my path and start afresh, but I hated turning back. I turned north, and headed across unmapped desert. I dropped down close to the ground and watched it so closely that I think I would have seen a rat on it. I crossed dry depressions, dry watercourses, dirty black hills and sandy mud, all dull, bare and lifeless. I was excited and thrilled; this was the stuff that life was made of.

  My funny-looking map attempted only to map a strip within five to 10 miles of the track, with bits of hills hachured in here and there. I doubted if the map would be any help to me. However, according to my mental dead reckoning, I should arrive at some hills marked on the map with a watercourse running through them, with the track 3 or 4 miles on the other side. I flew up to some hills that answered the description. Then, suddenly, there was the track – quite different this time. Several wheel ruts showed clearly. I wanted another check; the landing-ground D should be a few miles back. Sure enough the D turned up as expected. I turned right about, and set off for Baghdad singing a song about Antonio. I saw no sign of animal or plant life of any kind, until 200 miles from Ziza I came across an Arab caravan with a flock of sheep. I wondered how they could exist. I had an extraordinary sense of freedom and a feeling of well-being flying low over the desert. I landed at Rutbah Wells after six and three-quarter hours in the air to cover 526 miles (without counting the diversion), a speed made good of only 75 miles an hour. Rutbah Wells was a romantic spot in the middle of the desert, a large square fort with buildings backed up inside to the high walls. There were camel caravans inside, and a squad of Iraqi infantry. Here, the track which I had followed, and which they said was rarely used, joined the motor-coach route between Baghdad and Damascus. There was an Imperial Airways mechanic stationed at Rutbah, and I finally coaxed him to help me grind the valve of my dud No. 2 cylinder. We pushed the Moth through the barbed-wire entanglements into the fort and drew her up to the window of the mechanic's room, so that he could fasten an electric inspection lamp to a blade of the propeller from a switch in his bedroom. We took off the manifold and piston head to find the exhaust valve badly pitted. I produced a new one that I thought would take less time to grind in. It began to freeze. We finished the grinding, and put the cylinder back, but the compression was worse than before. We tried to puzzle out what could be wrong. I was tempted to leave it, in the hopes that it would get right when the engine was warmed up next day; it was getting late, and I was very tired. However, I decided that we had better take it off again. The valves looked and seemed all right, and we fitted them back once more. We filled the cylinder head up with petrol and the valve seatings held the petrol, so they simply must be all right. This time the compression was excellent.

  When I got to bed at last in an Iraqi officer's room I lay listening to some delightful music. I could distinguish flutes, quietly tinkling bells and some outlandish instruments that I had not heard before. When I was having breakfast at 5 o'clock next morning I asked the manager, Fraser, who had played this music last night. 'Music?' he said. 'There was no music here.'

  It was wretchedly cold, and the motor would not start. The mechanic and I took turns at swinging the propeller, and got worn out at it. The motor would fire once, but had not enough power to overcome the friction of the frozen oil. It was not until 7.30 that it suddenly started with a roar, and I took off. Yesterday's unique feeling of isolation was now lost because the desert was crowded. In the first 100 miles I saw two motorcars and several Arab caravans, with black tents and flocks of sheep.

  At Baghdad the aerodrome manager, Phelps, was the most efficient I had come across. I told him that I would have been along three weeks earlier if he had been in charge of each of the airfields where I had refuelled. He had medical, Customs and police authorities waiting, who cleared me immediately; he fed me, had the Moth refuelled with forty-three gallons of petrol and two gallons of oil, wrote his name on the fuselage, and got me into the air again within fifty minutes of my touching down. He had also procured me a weather report that forecast a 35mph favourable wind at 5,000 feet, so I climbed up straight away to that height.

  The town of Bushire in Persia was already lighted up when I reached it. I found the airfield by spotting a hangar. A motorcar was moving slowly across the middle of the airfield, and as I flew over it low, to look at the surface, the car stopped and disgorged two or three women, who fled for their lives in different directions, leaving the car stranded. Had I been touching down as they thought I must surely have bowled over one of them.

  When I landed and taxied towards the hangars I had been in the air for eight and three-quarter hours to cover a distance of 772 miles at a speed of 88mph. As I switched off the motor my 8s 6d alarm clock sounded. The Imperial Airways mechanic was intrigued, and asked for an explanation. I said that I used it to tell me when it was time to land, but I fear he thought I was joking. After a short snooze I went off to the shore for a bathe. The sea water was like a soothing balm after the beating my nerves had taken in the open cockpit from the roaring exhaust. It was a clear moonlit night, and I noticed two goats standing on the edge of a large log, solemnly watching me. They remained motionless so long that I became curious to know why. After drying myself by a run up and down the beach I dressed and went over to investigate. I found that the goats were two wheels and the undercarriage of a DHA aeroplane, lying on its back and dripping petrol. I filled my cigarette lighter from the petrol. I found out that a Persian military pilot had flown this aeroplane into the top of the wireless mast an hour before I arrived. He nearly pulled off an excellent landing afterwards, but ran out of flat land and somersaulted over a bank on to the seashore. The aeroplane was wrecked, but he escaped.

  I was lent an old campbed and fell asleep listening to the same charming tune from my private orchestra. I slept comfortably till 5 o'clock when the camp-bed split in the middle, and dropped me on the floor with a bump.

  I got into the air at 6.15 a.m., and after 250 miles passed Qais Island, which Marco Polo visited in 1271. I refuelled at Jask at 1 o'clock after a 560-mile run. Then I flew on to Chahbar, where I landed after nine hours in the air to cover a distance o 740 miles at 82mph. Hackett, in charge of the radio station, was the only European there, and he was very pleased to see the first European for several months. He told me how Alan Cobham had landed on his flight out to Australia when his mechanic was killed by a pot shot from an Arab while crossing the desert.

  I got away at 5.20 next morning for a six-hour flight to Karachi, a distance of 430 miles. This flight was uneventful, except that I saw a huge school of porpoises in the sea off the coast, which made me long enviously for the peace of the sea. During the next five days I flew across India and down to Singapore. I was forty-two and a quarter hours in the air to cover 3,500 miles, an average speed of 83½mph Crossing India, I refuelled at Nasirabad, Jhansi, Allahabad and Calcutta. I spent the night at Jhansi, where I was lucky to find three RAF fighter planes on manoeuvres. I spent a delightful evening with the crews, and they provided me with a bath in a canvas camp bath, and a campbed in a tent. All this time the flying conditions were delightful. I enjoyed the flight, in spite of the motor, which was running increasingly rougher until it vibrated unpleasantly. This caused me to keep a constant lookout for a possible open space on which to land if the motor failed. At Calcutta an efficient mechanic called Woolland, working for the Aerial Survey Company, ground in the valves of the No. 2 cylinder that was causing most of the trouble. He, and some Indians helping him, worked all one afternoon and evening on the job. I was most grateful to have someone to do it for me. Fatigue was nagging at me again. It was not because of flying, but because of the unending negotiations and talk from the moment I landed up to the moment I took off again, apart from the few hours spent in sleeping. Each day my time on the ground was cut by about three-quarters of an hour because I was flying east.

  After Calcutta, I flew along the coast to Akyab. Here I landed in sheepskin thigh boots, a Sidcote suit (like a boiler suit of three thicknesses) and fur gloves. An hour later I took off in shirt sleeves after a roasting on the ground.

  I was beginning to find that the overloaded Moth required a much longer run for taking off in the hot air. I landed for the night on Rangoon racecourse. Several horses were exercising there when I arrived, and I circled the course for ten minutes to give them time to get clear.

  On leaving Rangoon at dawn, I flew over flat ground cut into tiny plots for 40 miles. The smoke from each hut had drifted away in a straight level line. There were hundreds of lines of smoke, from 1 to 5 miles in length, all straight, level and the same thickness, so that they looked like grey lines joining the huts as far as one could see.

  I had a scare at Victoria Point, the southernmost point of Burma. The landing-ground was a terrible spot, shut in by hills and bordered by dense jungle with palms. At the eastern end a hill seemed to overhang it. The Air Ministry notice had said it was 1,560 yards long, but in my first attempt to land I overshot badly. The second time, although I came in only a foot above the corner, it looked as if I was going to overshoot again. I thought that my judgement must be badly wrong to overshoot a 1,560-yard field. I side-slipped, and put the Moth down firmly with a bump. Even then I only just stopped short of the jungle, because the airfield sloped downhill there. I was told afterwards that the airfield would be 1,560 yards long when it had been enlarged, and the hill removed but that now it was 350 yards long. Next morning I was faced with taking off fully loaded, because there was no landing-ground between there and Singapore – ten hours flying farther on. I was nervy and apprehensive, and I walked all over the field. If I used the longest possible run, I must take off straight towards the palm-covered hill. There was a narrow road winding through the jungle beside it, and I debated whether I could twist along the clearing made for the road.

  Finally, I picked a shorter run across the field, where the trees at the end would be slightly easier to clear. I pushed the throttle wide open. The
Gipsy Moth
gathered speed so slowly that it seemed an age before even the tail skid began to lift from the ground. The plane just crawled across the field, and was still firmly sticking to the ground when I reached the wire fence at the end. At the last instant I yanked the nose up and hurtled over the fence in stalled condition. That was only one step. Straight ahead, a wall of palms. Again I kept the nose down till the last second in an attempt to get up more speed. I was wondering if she could clear them. I yanked her up again, and jumped the trees. Stalled, she just made it. This escape ruined the day's flying for me; it was just pure luck that I had got away.

  I made a non-stop flight of ten hours to Singapore, and after an amusing evening in the mess of No. 205 Flying-Boat Squadron I took off next morning for Batavia. During the 80-mile crossing to Sumatra I climbed above the clouds, which were then covering about seven-tenths of the sky. They were steadily growing thicker and higher. At 9 o'clock, when I reached Sumatra, the sun was scorching the side of my neck, so I pulled out a topi which Russell of Victoria Point had given me, but it blew overboard, and I had to watch it twirling down, down through the air. At first I was contented to be floating among the billowy white masses of cloud and sunshine, but when their tops were above me at 7,500 feet I thought that I had better not climb any higher and zigzagged down between them, finally shooting through into clear space beneath. The bottoms of these tall sugar-loaf clouds were flat, 2,000 feet above the land. It was like flying into hot steam. The map had the same symbols here as for the salt marshes in North Africa, but when I looked round for marshes I could see nothing but solid jungle to the horizon in every direction. There was no sign of life, and not even a single break for a river. Steam was drifting from patches of the dark green treetops. I could not imagine a more solitary place. A column of rain was pouring from the middle of each cloud, and soon it was like weaving through a forest of giant dirty-white mushrooms. Occasionally the sun broke through, brightening a green patch of the forest tops. While traversing these I could see blue sky through a 7,000-foot high chimney of blowsy cloud.