High Road to China. Jon Cleary

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      It was a bitch of a storm, the worst I had experienced up till then. I have never been a religious man, at least not down on the ground; and if one is going to be religious, that’s the place to be it, down among the selfish, the cheats, the murderers who are there to test your Christianity or whatever you profess to believe. No, the only time I’ve been religious is when I’ve been up in the air: marvelling at God’s genius and charity in creating the sky or cursing Him for the storms He could whip up out of nowhere, showing off His wrath. This was one of His most wrathful.

      The turbulence hit us long before we were into the clouds. I had turned east, hoping to fly round the edge of the storm, but it was moving too fast for us. The edge of it caught us and in a matter of moments we were bucking the giant waves of air as they hit us. I had looked down just before the clouds enveloped us, but there was nowhere to head for as a landing site. We were over hills that rolled up into mountains; and the thought of the mountains frightened me. I had jerked my hand upwards, hoping Miss Tozer and Kern were watching me, then pulled back the stick and began to climb. If we were lucky we might get above the storm, but in any case we’d be above the top of the mountains. Mountain tops and aeroplanes still have an upsetting magnetism for each other and even today, at 30,000 feet, I can’t fly over a range of mountains without feeling them scraping my bottom.

      I lost sight of the other two machines as soon as the cloud, a wild dark sea, rolled in on us. From a distance the clouds had looked purple; now they were black and green. The air had suddenly turned cold, made even colder by the rain that hit me like a barrage of knives. I continued climbing, fighting the stick that shook in my hands and threatened to break my arms at the wrists and elbows. The turbulence was like nothing I had ever known before; the yo-yo hadn’t been invented then, but I should have got the inspiration and patented it. The noise was more than noise: it was a physical assault inside my head. I reeled in my seat with it, punch-drunk, deaf but still able to hear. Lightning had been exploding behind the clouds, throwing them into bright relief, making them look solid and impenetrable. Suddenly it burst all around me, a great flash of blue-white light that blinded me, yet in the moment before blinding me painted everything in frightening detail: I saw things, the dials on the instrument panel, the worn rim of the cockpit, the tear in the back of my right-hand glove: I saw them, yet I was inside them. It was an effect I had once experienced as a child during an attack of petit-mal, the splitting of oneself in a split-second dream: you are inside and outside the objects you are witnessing at the same moment. I felt sure now that I was about to pass out, that I was seeing the final, meaningless revelation before dying.

      The lightning went and I looked up. And saw the plane only half a dozen feet above me. I didn’t know whose it was, Miss Tozer’s or Kern’s: all I knew was that the pilot couldn’t see me. We flew almost locked together, the wheels of the plane above only a foot or two from my top wing. Lightning flared again; half-blinded I saw the plane above tremble and dip. I plunged the stick forward, hit turbulence, shuddered, then fell away from beneath the other threatening machine. There was no time to look up to see if it was following me.

      Then the Bristol flipped over, flung sideways by the greatest explosion of sound I’ve ever felt: not heard. My head reverberated with it, an echo chamber that threatened to drive me insane. Sanity, fortunately, has nothing to do with the urge to survive. Unbreathing, paralysed, mind and body dead, the unthinking me refused to let the aeroplane go. My hands and arms worked of their own accord; then feeling came back into my legs and feet. I fought with the only two weapons I had, the stick and the rudder bar; yet they were the machine’s weapons, too, for it was fighting me. It was not in a spin; we seemed to be plunging in a series of tight bucking slides. I still couldn’t see; lightning glared around me again, but it was only a lightening of the darkness in my blinded eyes. I worked by feel, fighting the plane by instinct, going with the slide at times, pulling against it at others, praying all the time with the mind that was slowly coming back to life that the wings would not tear off, that the machine would not disintegrate and leave me sitting there for the last moment at the top of the long drop to eternity. I believed in God then and hated Him for wanting me to join Him.

      Then I found I was winning. The Bristol slid to starboard, kept sliding and I let it go, feeling I was getting it under control. I eased the rudder to port, pulled the stick back; the plane responded, straightened out. The wind and the rain were still pounding at me, but now the Bristol and I were part of each other again, ready to fight together. I held the stick steady and we drove on through the storm, the wings trembling as if ready to break off but always holding, the engine coughing once but then coming on again with a challenging note that gave me heart. I glanced at the altimeter: I had dropped 3000 feet since I had last looked at it. I had no idea of the height of the mountains I had glimpsed (were they still ahead of me? Below me?); but I dared not try to climb above the storm again. I had to ride it out at this level; the galleries of hell were topsy-turvy, one stood a better chance of survival in the lower depths. I wondered where Miss Tozer and Kern were, if they were still flying or had already crashed, but there was nothing I could do about going looking for them. I shivered when I thought how close I had been to that other Bristol in the clouds.

      It took me twenty minutes, forever, to fly out of the storm. Then, as so often happens, I came out abruptly into bright mocking sunlight. I checked the compass; we were miles off course. But there was no hope of correcting just now; over to starboard the storm still stretched away to the south, its darkness lit with explosions of lightning. I looked back and around for the others. Then I saw them come out of the clouds, too close to each other for comfort; Kern swung abruptly to port to widen the distance between them. I throttled back, waited for them to come up to me. Miss Tozer waved to say she was all right; but Kern pointed to his top wing and I saw the tattered fabric and the splintered strut. He was holding the machine steady, but he would have to do that if he was to keep it in the air; any sudden manoeuvre would rip the wing to shreds. I waved to him, then looked down and about for a possible landing site. But there was none: we were over mountains that offered no comfort at all.

      There was nothing to do but keep flying, hoping Kern’s wing would hold, till I saw some place where we could set down without his having to put too much strain on his machine. It was just as likely to fall to pieces as he eased the stick back for the gentlest of landings, but that was something we had to risk.

      Then at last I saw the long narrow valley ahead, with the straight white road running down the middle of it. I waved to the others to circle over the valley while I went down to inspect the road. I slid down, aware of the workers in the fields on either side stopping to look up at me, at some of them running in terror for the shelter of neighbouring trees; but I kept my attention on the white dirt road, looking for the thin shadows in the afternoon sun that would tell of ruts or holes in the surface. There appeared to’ be none and I banked steeply and climbed back. I made signs that I would go down first, Miss Tozer would follow and Kern would be the last to land.

      I went back to the end of the valley, passing over a large mansion standing among trees, then slid in above the road. There were no telegraph poles bordering it to offer a hazard; and it ran without a bend in it for almost a mile. I put the Bristol down, felt the smoothness of the dirt and knew I was safe. I rolled down the road, eased to a stop and swung off into a field. I jumped down and ran back to the road.

      Miss Tozer came in, steady as a bird, bounced a little as she touched, corrected and ran down towards me. She swung off into the field, got out and came running back. She stood beside me and watched as Kern, coming round in a wide flat bank so that he didn’t strain the upper wing too much, prepared to land. He came down steadily and I knew how he would be: one eye on the nose, the other on the wing above him. He was ten feet above the road, holding the nose up, when the wing started to shred off. It went back over his head in tatters at first, as if he had run into a flock of starlings; then the big strip tore off and I saw him duck as it flew straight at his head. Miraculously he jerked neither his hands nor his feet; he kept the plane steady while the upper wing disintegrated above him. I felt СКАЧАТЬ