Section 5 of Actions and Reactions This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Janu Actions and Reactions by Radyard Kipling The Mother Hive If the stock had not been old and overcrowded, the wax moth would never have entered, or bees are too thick on the comb, there must be sickness or parasites. The heat of the hive had risen with the June honey flow, and though the farmers worked until their wings ached to keep people cool, everybody suffered. A young bee crawled up the greasy trampled lighting board. Excuse me, she began, but it's my first honey flight. Could you kindly tell me if this is my own hive? The guard snapped. Yes, buzz in and befall brooded to you. Next. Shame, cried half a dozen old workers with worn wings and nerves, and there was a scuffle and a hum. The little gray wax moth, pressed close in a crack in the lighting board, had waited this chance all day. She scuttled in like a ghost, and knowing the senior bees would turn her out at once, dodged into a brood frame, where youngsters who had not yet seen the winds blow or the flowers gnaw, discussed life. Here she was safe, for young bees will tolerate any sort of stranger. Behind her came the bee who had been slain by the guard. What is the world like, Melissa? said a companion.  She sat down in the cool jot across the combs. If you'd only heard, said the wax moth silkily, the insolence of the guard's tone when she cursed our sister. It aroused the entire community. She laid an egg. She had stolen in for that purpose. There was a bit of a fuss on the gate, Melissa chuckled. You were there, Miss? She did not know how to address the slim stranger. Don't call me Miss. I'm a sister to all in affliction, just a working sister. My heart bled for you beneath your burden. The wax moth caressed Melissa with her soft feelers and laid another egg. You mustn't lay here, cried Melissa. You aren't a queen. My dear child, I give you my most solemn word of honor. Those aren't eggs.  She raised to voice a little above the rustle and tramp around her. If you'd like to kill me, pray do. Don't be unkind, Melissa, said a young bee, impressed by the chaste folds of the wax moth's wing, which hid her ceaseless egg-dropping. I haven't done anything, Melissa answered. She's doing it all. Ah, don't let your conscience reproach you later, but when you've killed me, write me at least as one that loved her fellow worker. Laying at every saw, the wax moth backed into a crowd of young bees and left Melissa bewildered and annoyed. So she lifted up her little voice in the darkness and cried, Stores, till a gang of cell fillers hailed her, and she left her load with them. I'm afraid I foul-brooded you just now, said a voice over her shoulder. I'd been on the gate for three hours, and one would foul-brood the queen herself after that. No offense meant. None taken, Melissa answered cheerily. I shall be on guard myself someday. What's next to do? There's a rumor of death's head moths about. Send a gang of youngsters to the gate and tell them to narrow it in with a couple of stout scrapwax pillars. It'll make the hive hot, but we can't have death's headers in the middle of our honey flow. My only wings, I should think not. Melissa had all a sound bee's hereditary hatred against the big, squeaking, feathery thief of the hives. Tumble out, she called across the youngsters' quarters. All you who aren't feeding babies show a leg. Scrapwax pillars for the gate. She chanted the order at length. That's nonsense, a downy, day-old bee answered. In the first place, I never heard of a death's header coming into a hive. People don't do such things. In the second, building pillars to keep him out is purely a Cypriot trick, unworthy of British bees. In the third, if you trust a death's head, he will trust you. Pillar building shows a lack of confidence. Our dear sister in grey says so. Yes, pillars are un-English and provocative and a waste of wax that is needed for higher and more practical ends. Said the wax mouth from an empty store cell. The safety of the hive is the highest thing I've ever heard of. You mustn't teach us to refuse work, Melissa began. You misunderstand me as usual, love. Works the essence of life, but to expend precious un-returning vitality and real labour against imaginary danger that is heartbreakingly absurd.  She hasn't lived in vain, the darling cried twenty bees together. You should see her saintly life, Melissa. She just devotes herself to spreading her principles. And she looked lovely. An old, baldish bee came up the comb.  The wax mouth slipped aside. The young bees trooped down the frame whispering. What's the matter with them? said the oldster. Why do they call each other ducky and darling? Must be the weather. She sniffed suspiciously. Horrid, stuffy smell here, like stale quilts. Not wax mouth, I hope, Melissa. Not to my knowledge, said Melissa, who of course only knew the wax mouth as a lady with principles and had never thought to report her presence. She had always imagined wax mouths to be like blood red dragonflies. You had better fan out this corner for a little, said the old bee and passed on. Melissa dropped her head at once, took firm hold with her forefeet and fanned obediently at the regulation stroke three hundred beats to the second. Fanning tries a bee's temper because she must always keep in the same place where she never seems to be doing any good and all the while she is wearing out her only wing. When a bee cannot fly, a bee must not live and a bee knows it. The wax mouth crept forward and caressed Melissa again. I see, she murmured, that at heart you are one of us. I work with the hive, Melissa answered briefly. It's the same thing. We and the hive are one. Then why are your feelers different from ours? Don't cuddle so. Don't be provincial, Charisma. You can't have all the world alike yet. But why do you lay eggs, Melissa insisted?  I've watched you. Ah, bright eyes, so you've pierced my little subterfuge. Yes, they are eggs. By and by they'll spread our principles. Aren't you glad? You gave me your most solemn word of honor that they were not eggs. That was my little subterfuge, dearest, for the sake of the cause. Now I must reach the young. The wax moth tripped toward the fourth brood frame where the young bees were busy feeding the babies. It takes some time for a sound bee to realize a malignant and continuous lie. She's very sweet and feathery, was all that Melissa thought, but her talk sounds like Ivy Honey tastes. I'd better get to my fieldwork again. She found the gate in a sulky uproar. The youngsters told off to the pillars had refused to choose scrap wax because it made their jaws ache and were clamoring for virgin stuff. Anything to finish the job, said the badgered guards, hang up some of you and make wax for these slack-jogged sisters. Before a bee can make wax, she must fill herself with honey. Then she climbs to safe foothold and hangs, while other gorged bees hang out to her in a cluster. Then they wait in silence till the wax comes. The scales are either taken out of the maker's pockets by the workers or tinkled down on the workers while they wait. The workers chew them, they are useless untued, into the all-supporting, all-embracing wax of the hive. But now, no sooner was the wax cluster in position than the workers below broke out again. Come down, they cried. Come down and work.  Don't think to enjoy yourselves up there while we're sweating down here. The cluster shivered, as from hooked forefoot to hooked hindfoot it telegraphed uneasiness. At last, a worker sprang up, grabbed the lowest wax maker and swung, kicking above her companions. I can make wax too, she bawled, give me a full gorge and I'll make tons of it. Make it then, said the bee she had grappled. The spoken word snapped the current through the cluster. It shook and glistened like a cat's fur in the dark. Unhook, it murmured, no wax for anyone today. You lazy thieves, hang up at once and produce our wax, said the bees below. Impossible, the sweat's gone. To make your wax, we must have stillness, warmth and food. Unhook, unhook. They broke up as they murmured and disappeared among the other bees, from whom, of course, they were undistinguishable. Seems as if we'd have to choose grappwax for these pillars after all, said a worker. Not by a whole comb, cried the young bee who had broken the cluster. Listen here, I've studied the question more than 20 minutes.  You've heard of Cheshire, Root and Langstroth? They had not, but they shouted, Good ol' Langstroth, just the same. Those three know all there is to be known about making hives. One or the other of them must have made ours and if they've made it, they are bound to look after it. Ours is a guaranteed patent hive. You can see it on the label behind. Good ol' guarantee, hurrah for the label behind, roared the bees. Well, such being the case, I say that when we find they've betrayed us, we can exact from them a terrible vengeance. Good ol' vengeance, good ol' Root! Nuff said, chuck it! The crowd cheered and broke away as Melissa dived through. Do you know where Langstroth, Root and Cheshire live if you happen to want them? She asked of the proud painting orator. Gummy, if I know they ever lived at all! But aren't they beautiful names to buzz about? Did you see how it worked up the sisterhood? Yes, but it didn't defend the gate, she replied. Ah, perhaps that's true, but think how delicate my position is, sister. I have a magnificent appetite and I don't like working, it's bad for the mind. My instinct tells me that I can act as a restraining influence on others. They would have been worse but for me. But Melissa had already risen clear and was heading for a breath of virgin white clover, which to an overtired bee is as soothing as plain knitting to a woman. I think I'll take this low to the nurseries, she said when she had finished. It was always quiet there in my day and she topped off with two little pets of pollen for the babies. She was met on the fourth brood comb by a rush of excited sisters all buzzing together. One at a time, one at a time, let me put down my load. Now, what is it, saccharis up? She said. Grey sister, that fluffy one I mean, she came and said, we ought to be out in the sunshine gathering honey because life was short. She said any old bee could attend to our babies and someday old bees would. That isn't true, Melissa, is it? No old bees can take us away from our babies, can they? Of course not. You feed the babies when your heads are soft. When your heads harden, you go on to field work. Anyone knows that. We told her so. We told her so but she only waved her feelers and said we could all lay eggs like queens if we chose. And I'm afraid lots of the weaker sisters believe her and are trying to do it so unsettling. Saccharis us, fed to a sealed worker cell whose lid pulsated as the bee within began to cut its way out. Come along precious, she murmured and thinned the frail top from the other side. A pale, damp, creased thing hoisted itself feebly onto the comb. Saccharis says no, changed at once. No time to waste, go up the frame and preen yourself, she said. Report for nursing duty in my war tomorrow evening at six. Stop a minute, what's the matter with your third right leg? The young bee held it out in silence, unmistakably a germ leg incapable of packing pollen. Thank you, you needn't report till the day after tomorrow. Saccharis had turned to her companion. That's the fifth oddity hatched in my ward since noon. I don't like it. There's always a certain number of them said Melissa. You can't stop a few working sisters from laying now and then when they overfeed themselves. They only raise dwarf drones. But we're hatching out drones with worker stomachs, workers with drone stomachs, and albinos and mixed leggers who can't pack pollen like that poor little beast yonder. I don't mind dwarf drones any more than you do.  But the steady hatch of oddities frightens me, Melissa. How narrow of you. They are all so delightfully clever and unusual and interesting. Piped the wax moth from a crack above them. Come here you dear Downey duck and tell us all about your feelings. I wish she'd go, Saccharis lowered her voice. She meets these oddities as they dry out and cuddles them in corners. I suppose the truth is that we're overstocked and too well fed to swarm, said Melissa. That is the truth, said the queen's voice behind them. They had not heard the heavy royal footfall which sets empty cells vibrating. Saccharis offered her food at once. She ate and dragged her wary body forward. Can you suggest a remedy? She said. No principles, cried the wax moth from her crevice, will apply them quietly later. Suppose we sent out a swarm, Melissa suggested. It's a little late, but it might ease us off. It would save us, but I know the hives you shall see for yourself. The old queen cried the swarming cry, to which a beat of good blood should be what the trumpet was to Job's warhorse. In spite of her immense age, three years, it rang between the cannon-like frames as a pibrock rings in a mountain pass. The fanners changed their note and repeated it up in every gallery, and the broad-winged drones, burly and eager, ended it on one nerve-thrilling outbreak of bugles. La reine le veut, swarm, swarm, swarm. But the roar which should follow the call was wanting. They heard a broken grumble, like the murmur of a falling tide. Swarm, what for? Catch me leaving a good bar-frame hive with fixed foundations for a rotten old oak out in the open where it may rain any minute. We're all right. It's a patent-guaranteed hive. Why do they want to turn us out? Swarming be gummed. Swarming was invented to cheat a worker out of her proper comforts. Come on off to bed. The noise died out as the bees settled in empty cells for the night. You hear, said the queen, I know the hive. Quite between ourselves. I taught them that, cried the waxmouth. Wait till my principles develop, and you'll see the light from a new quarter. You speak truth for once, the queen said suddenly, for she recognized the waxmouth. That light will break into the top of the hive. A hot smoke will follow it, and your children will not be able to hide in any crevice. Is it possible, Melissa whispered, I, we have sometimes heard a legend like it. It is no legend, the old queen answered. I had it from my mother, and she had it from hers. After the waxmouth has grown strong, a shadow will fall across the gate, a voice will speak from behind a veil. There will be light and hot smoke and earthquakes, and those who live will see everything that they have done, all together in one place, burned up in one great fire. The old queen was trying to tell what she had been told of the bee masters dealing with an infected hive in the apiary, two or three seasons ago. And of course, from her point of view, the affair was as important as the day of judgment. And then, asked horrified Sakharissa, then I have heard that a little light will burn in a great darkness, and perhaps the world will begin again. Myself, I think not.  There were. When her eggs hatched, the wax was riddled with little tunnels, coated with the dirty clothes of caterpillars.  The lions ended in a maze of sticky webbing on the face of the comb. The caterpillars could not stop spinning as they walked, and as they walked everywhere, they smarmed and garmed everything. Even where it did not hamper the bee's feet, the stale sour smell of the stuff put them off their work. Though some of the bees who had taken to egg lane said it encouraged them to be mothers and maintain a vital interest in life. When the caterpillars became moths, they made friends with the ever-increasing oddities, albinos, mixed leggers, single-eyed composites, faceless drones, half queens and laying sisters, and the ever dwindling band of the old stock worked themselves bald and fray-wing to feed their queer charges. Most of the oddities would not and many on account of their malformations could not go through a day's fieldwork, but the wax moths, who were always busy on the brood comb, found pleasant home occupations for them. One albino, for instance, divided the number of pounds of honey in stock by the number of bees in the hive, and proved that if every bee only gathered honey for seven and three-quarter minutes a day, she would have the rest of the time to herself and could have accompanied the drones on their mating flights. The drones were not at all pleased. Another, an eyeless drone with no feelers, said that all brood cells should be perfect circles, so as not to interfere with the grub or the workers. He proved that the old six-sided cell was solely due to the workers building against each other on opposite sides of the wall, and that if there were no interference, there would be no angles. Some bees tried the new plant for a while and found it cost eight times more wax than the old six-sided specification, and as they never allowed a cruster to hang up and make wax in peace, real wax was scarce. However, they eked out their task with varnish stolen from new coffins at funerals, and it made them rather sick. Then they took to catching round sugar factories and breweries because it was easiest to get their materials from those places, and the mixture of glucose and beer naturally and brew the store shelves out of shade besides smelling abominably. Some of the sound bees warned them that ill-gotten gains never prosper, but the oddities at once surrounded them and bowled them to death. There was a punishment they were almost as fond of as they were of eating, and they expected the sound bees to feed them. Curiously enough, the age-old instinct of loyalty and devotion towards the hive made the sound bees do this, though their reason told them they ought to slip away and unite with some other healthy stalk of the apiary. What, about seven and three-quarters minutes work now? said Melissa one day as she came in. I've been at it for five hours, and I've only half a load. Oh, the hive subsists on the hyvel honey which the hive produces, said a blind oddity squatting in a sore cell. But the honey is gathered from flowers outside two miles away sometimes, cried Melissa. Pardon me, said the blind thing, sucking hard, but this is the hive, is it not? It was. Worse luck, it is. And the hyvel honey is here, is it not? It opened a fresh store cell to prove it. Yes, but it won't be long at this rate. The rates have nothing to do with it. This hive produces the hyvel honey. You people never seem to grasp the economic simplicity that underlies all life. Oh, me, said poor Melissa, haven't you ever been beyond the gate? Certainly not. A fool's eyes are in the ends of the earth. Mine are in my head. It gorge till it bloated. Melissa took refuge in her poorly paid fieldwork and told Zacharus of the story. Hunt, said that wise bee, fretting with an old maid of a thistle, tell us something new.  What's the end going to be? All the honey going out and none coming in? Things can't last this way, said Melissa. Who cares, said Zacharus? I know now how drones feel the day before they're killed. A short life and a merry one for me. If it only were merry, but think of those awful, solemn, lopsided oddities waiting for us at home, crawling and clambering and preaching and dirtying things in the dark. I don't mind that so much their silly songs after we fed them, all about work among the merry, merry blossoms, Zacharus up from the deeps of a stale canterbury bell. I do. How's our queen, said Melissa? Cheerfully hopeless as usual, but she lays an egg now and then. Does she so?  Suppose now we sound workers tried to raise a princess in some clean corner? You'd be put to it to find one. The hives all wax moth and muckings. But, well, a princess might help us in the time of the voice behind the veil that the queen talks of. Anything is better than working for oddities that chirp about work that they can't do and waste what we bring home. Who cares, said Zacharus? I'm with you for the fun of it. The oddities would ball us to death if they knew. Come home and we'll begin. There is no room to tell how the experienced Melissa found a far-off frame so messed and mishandled by abandoned cell-building experiments that, for very shame the bees never went there.   How the queen obeyed and died. How her spent carcass was flung out on the rubbish heap and how a multitude of laying sisters went about dropping drone eggs where they listed and said there was no more need of queens. How, covered by this confusion, Zacharissa educated certain young bees to educate certain newborn bees in the lost art of making royal jelly. How the nectar was won out of hours in the teeth of chill wind. How the hidden egg hatched true. No drone but blood-royal. How it was capped and how desperately they worked to feed and double-feed the now-swarming oddities lest any break in the food supplies should set them to instituting inquiries which, with songs about work, was their favorite amusement. How in an auspicious hour on a moonless night the princess came forth the princess indeed and how Melissa smuggled her into a dark, empty honey magazine to bide her time and how the drones, knowing she was there, went about singing the deep, disreputable love songs of the old days to the scandal of the laying sisters who do not think well of drones. These things are written in the Book of Queens which is laid up in the hollow of the great Ash Yedrasil. After a few days the weather changed again and became glorious. Even the oddities would now join the crowd that hung out on the lighting board and would sing of work among the merry, merry blossoms till an untrained ear might have received it for the hum of a working hive. Yet in truth their store honey had been eaten long ago. Today, today on the efforts of the few sound bees while the wax moth fretted and consumed again their already ruined wax. But the sound bees never mentioned these matters. They knew if they did the oddities would hold the meeting and ball them to death. Now you see what we have done said the wax moths. We have created new material, a new convention, a new type as we said we would. A new possibilities for us said the laying sisters gratefully. You have given us a new life's work, vital and paramount. More than that chanted the oddities in the sunshine. You have created a new heaven and a new earth, heaven, cloudless and accessible. It was a perfect August evening. An earth teeming with the merry, merry blossoms waiting only our honest toil to turn them all to good. The earth aster and the crocus and the earth ladies smock in her season, the chrysanthemum after her kind and the gulder rose bringing forth abundantly with all. Oh, holy himmest said Melissa, Ostra. I knew they didn't know how honey was made but they forgotten the order of the flowers. What will be come of them?  The oddities crawled in and a voice behind the veil said, I have neglected the old hive too long. Give me the smoker. Melissa heard and darted through the gate. Come, O come, she cried. It is the destruction the old queen foretold. Princess, come. Really, you are too archaic for words, said an oddity in an alleyway. A cloud, I admit, may have crossed the sun. But why hysterics? Above all, why princesses so late in the day? Are you aware it's the high-volt tea time? Let's sing grace. Melissa clawed past him with all six legs. Zacharissa had run to what was left of the fertile brood comb. Down and out, she called across the broad breath of it, nurses, guards, fanners, sweepers, out. Never mind the babies, they're better dead. Out before the light and the hot smoke. The princess's first clear, fearless call, Melissa had found her, rose and drummed through all the frames. La reine levaux, swarm, swarm, swarm. The hive shook beneath the shattering thunder of a struck-down quilt being torn back. Don't be alarmed, dearest, said the wax-moths. That's our work. Look up, and you'll see the dawn of a new day. Light broke in the top of the hive as the queen had prophecy, naked light on the boiling bewildered bees. Zacharissa had rounded up her rearguard, which dropped headlong off the frame and joined the princess's detachment thrusting toward the gate. Now a panic was in full blast and each sound bee found herself embraced by at least three oddities. The first instinct of a frightened bee is to break into the stores and gorge herself with honey. But there were no stores left, so the oddities fought with the sound bees. You must feed us, or we shall die, they cried, holding and clutching and slipping while the silent scared earwigs and little spiders twisted between their legs Think of the hive, traitors! The holy hive! You should have thought before, cried the sound bees, stay and see the dawn of your new day. They reached the gate at last over the soft body of many to whom they had ministered. On out up roared Melissa in the princess's ear for the hive's sake to the old oak. The princess left the alighting board, circled once and flung herself at the lowest branch of the old oak and her little loyal swarm you could have covered it with a pint mug followed, hooked and hung. Hold close, Melissa, guest! The old legends have come true! Look! The hive was half hidden by smoke. They heard a frame crack stickily, saw it heaved high and twirled round between enormous hands, blotched, bulged and perished horror of gray wax, corrupt brood and small drone cells all covered with crawling oddities strained to the sun. Why, this isn't a hive, this is a museum of curiosities! said the voice behind the veil. It was only the bee master talking to his son. Can you blame him, father? said a second voice. See here. Another frame came up. A finger poked through it and it broke away in wrestling flakes of ashy rottenness. Number four frame. That was your mother's pet comb once, whispered Melissa to the princess. Many is the good egg I've watched her lay there. Aren't you confusing post-hawk with prompter-hawk? said the bee master. Wax moth only succeed when weak bees let them in. That third frame crackled and rose into the light. All this is full of laying workers brood. That never happens till the stock weakened. Phew! He beat it on his knee like a tambourine and it also crumbled to pieces. The little swarms shivered as they watched the dwarf drone grub squirm feebly on the grass. Many sound bees had nursed on that frame while knowing their work was useless, but the actual sight of even useless work destroyed disheartens a good worker. No, they have some recuperative power left. Said the second voice, here's the queen cell. But it's tucked away among what on earth has come to the little wretches they seem to have lost the instinct of cell building. The father held up the frame where the bees had experimented in circular cell work. It looked like the pitted heart of a decaying told stool. Not all together, was uncorrected. There's one line at least of perfectly good cells. My work, said Zachary said to herself, I am glad man does me justice before. That frame too was smashed out and thrown atop of the others and the foul ear-wiggy quilts. As frame after frame followed it, the swarm beheld the upheaval, exposure and destruction of all that had been well or ill done in every cranny of their high for generations past. There was black comb so old that they had forgotten where hung. Orange buff and ochre varnish store comb built as bees were used to build before the days of artificial foundations. There was a little white frail new work. There were sheets on sheets of level even brood comb that had held in its time unnumbered thousands of unnamed workers. Patches of obsolete drone comb broad and high shoulder showing what marks the mailed grub was expected to grow. And two inch deep honey magazines empty but still magnificent. The whole gumden glued into twisted scrap work awry on the wires, half cells beginnings abandoned or grandiose weak walled composite cells pieced out with rubbish and capped with dirt. Good or bad, every inch of it was so riddled by the tunnels of the wax moth that it broke into clouds of dust as it was flung on the heap. Oh, sea! cried Zacharissa, the great burning that our queen foretold. Who can bear to look?  The figure stooped, lifted the hive and shook it upside down over the pyre. A cascade of oddities, chips of broken comb, scale fluff and grub slid out. Crackled, sizzled, popped a little and then the flames roared up and consumed all that fuel. We must disinfect, said a voice. Get me a sulfur candle, please. The shell of the hive returned to its place. A light was set in its sticky emptiness. Tear by tear, the figures built it up, closed the entrance and went away. The swarm watched the light leaking through the cracks all the long night. A dawn, one wax moth came by, fluttering impudently. There has been a miscalculation about the new day, my dears. She began, one can't expect people to be perfect all at once. That was our mistake. No, the mistake was entirely ours. Pardon me, said the wax moth. When you think of the enormous upheaval, call it good or bad, which our influence brought about, you will admit that we and we alone, you, said the princess, our stock was not strong. So you came, as any other disease might have come. Hang close all my people. When the sun rose, veiled figures came down and saw their swarm at the bow's end, waiting patiently within sight of the old hive, a handful, but prepared to go on. End of section five. Recording by Janu. Section six of actions and reactions. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Actions and reactions by Rudyard Kipling. The bees and the flies. A farmer of the Augustan age, perused in Virgil's golden page, the story of the secret one from Proteus by Cyrene's son, how the dank sea god sowed the swain means to restore his hives again.  The egregious rustic put to death the bull by stopping of its breath disposed the carcass in a shed with fragrant herbs and branches spread and having thus performed the charm sat down to wait the promised swarm. Nor waited long the god of day impartial quickening with his ray, evil and good alike beheld the carcass swelled big with new birth the belly heaves beneath its screen of scented leaves past any doubt the bull conceives. The farmer bids men bring more hives to house the prophet that arrives prepares on pan and key and kettle sweet music that shall make him settle but when to crown the work he goes God's what a stink salutes his nose where are the honest toilers where the gravate mistress of their care a busy scene indeed he sees but not a sign or sound of bees worms of the ripe or grave unhid by any kindly coffin lid obscene and shameless to the light see in in satiate appetite through putrid awful while above the hissing blowfly seeks his love whose offspring, supping where they sucked, consume corruption twice corrupt. End of Section 6 Section 7 of Actions and Reactions This is LibriVox Recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Actions and Reactions by Rudyard Kipling with The Night Mail a story of 2000 AD together with extracts from the magazine in which it appeared. At nine o'clock of Auguste winter night I stood on the lower stages of one of the GPO outward mail towers. My purpose was around to Quebec in quote, postal packet 162 or such other as may be appointed end quote, and the postmaster general himself counter signed the order. This talisman opened all doors, even those in the dispatching case and at the foot of the tower where they were delivering the sorted continental mail. The bags lay packed clothes as herrings in the long gray under bodies which are GPO still calls coaches. Five such coaches were filled as I watched and were shot up the guides to be locked on to their waiting packets 300 feet nearer the stars. From the dispatching case and I was conducted by a coaches and wonderfully learned official Mr. L. L. Geary, second dispatcher of the western route to the captain's room. These wakes and echo of old romance were the mail captains come on for their turn of duty. He introduces me to the captain of 162, captain porno, and his relief captain Hudson. The one is small and dark, the other large and red but each has the brooding sheathed glance characteristic of eagles and aeronauts. You can see it in the pictures of our racing professionals from L. V. Roach to little Ada Worley that fathomless obstruction of eyes habitually turned through naked space. On the notice board in the captain's room the pulsing arrows of some 20 indicators register degree by geographical degree the progress of as many homeward bound packets. The word Cape rises across the face of a dial. A gong strikes. The South African mid-weekly mail is in at the high gate receiving towers. That is all. It reminds one comically of the treacherous little bell which in pigeon fancies lofts notifies the return of a Homer. Time for us to be on the move, says captain porno, and we are shot up by the passenger lift to the top of the dispatch towers. Our coach will lock on when it is filled and the clerks are aboard. Number 162 waits for us in sleep E of the topmost stage. The great curve of her back shines frosty under the lights and some minute alteration on trim makes her rock a little in her holding down slips. Captain porno frowns and dives inside hissing softly. 162 comes to rest as level as a rule. From her North Atlantic winter nosecap worn bright as diamond with boring through uncounted leagues of hail, snow and ice to the inset of her three built out propeller shafts is some 240 feet. Her extreme diameter carried well forward is 37. Contrast this with the 900 by 95 of any crack liner and you will realize the power that must drive a hull through all weathers at more than the emergency speed of the cyclonic. The eye detects no joint in her skin plating, save the sweeping hair crack of the bow rudder, the maniax rudder that assured us the dominion of the unstable air and left its inventor penniless and half blind. It is calculated to Castelli's gullwing curve raise a few feet of that all but invisible plate three eighths of an inch and she will your five miles to port or starboard or she's under control again.  Count the hull forward, attach on the wheel will suffice and she sweeps at your good direction up or down.  Yes, says Captain Hudson answering my thought. Castelli thought he discovered the secret of controlling aeroplanes when he'd only found out how to steer dirigible balloons. Maniac invented his rudder to help war boats ram each other and war went out of fashion and Maniac he went out of his mind because he said he couldn't serve his country anymore. I wonder if any of us ever know what we're really doing. If you want to see the coach locked you'd better go aboard, it's due now, says Mr. Geary. I enter through the door amid ships. There is nothing here for display. The inner skin of the gas tanks comes down to within a foot or two of my head and turns over just short of the turn of the bilges. Liners and yachts disguise their tanks with decoration but the GPO serves them raw under a lick of grey official paint. The inner skin shuts off 50 feet of the bow and does much of the stern but the bow bulkhead is recessed for the lift shunting apparatus as the stern is pierced for the shaft tunnels. The engine room lies almost amid ships. Forward of it, extending to the turn of the bow tanks is an aperture, a bottomless hatch at present into which our coach will be locked. One looks down over the coamings 300 feet to the dispatching cave when his voice is boom upward the light below is obscured to a sound of thunder as our coach rises on its guides. It enlarges rapidly from a postage stamp to a playing card to a pond and last a pontoon. The two clerks, its crew, do not even look up as it comes into place. The kebac letters fly under their fingers and leap into the docketed racks while both captains and Mr. Geary satisfy themselves that the coach is locked home. A clerk passes the way bill over the hatch coaming Captain Pernell thumb marks and passes it to Mr. Geary Resid has been given and taken. Pleasant run, says Mr. Geary and disappears through the door which a foot high pneumatic compressor locks after him. Ah! sighs the compressor released. Our holding down clips part with a tang. We are clear. Captain Hudson opens the grey colloid under body-port hall through which I watch or for lighted London slide eastward as the gale gets hold of us. The first of the low winter clouds cuts off the well-known view and darkens Middlesex. On the south edge of it I can see a postal packet slide plowing through the white fleece. For an instant she gleams like a star ere she drops toward the high gate receiving towers. The Bombay mail, says Captain Hudson and looks at his watch. She's forty minutes late. What's our level? I ask. A thousand. Aren't you coming up on the bridge? The bridge, let us ever praise the GPO as a repository of ancient tradition, is represented by a view of Captain Hudson's legs where he stands on the control platform that runs thought ships overhead. The bow colloid is unshuttered and Captain Pernal, one hand on the wheel, is feeling for a fair slant. The dial shows forty three hundred feet. It's steep tonight, he mutters. A stir on tier of cloud drops under. We generally pick up an easterly draft below three thousand at this time of year.  So does Van Cutsom. Look at him hunting for his slant, says Captain Hudson. A fog light breaks cloud a hundred fathoms below. The ant-warp night mail makes her signal and rises between two racing clouds far to port. Her flanks blood red in the glare of sheerness double light. The gale will have us over the North Sea in half an hour, but Captain Pernal lets her go composedly, nosing to every point of the compass as she rises. Five thousand, six? Six thousand eight hundred? The deep dial reads, ere we find the easterly draft heralded by a flurry of snow at the thousand fathom level. Captain Pernal rings up the engines and keys down the governor on the switch before him. There is no sense in urging machinery when Aeolus himself gives you good knots for nothing. We are away in earnest now, our nose notched home on our chosen star. At this level the lower clouds are laid out, all neatly combed by the dry fingers of the east. Below that again is the strong westerly blow through which we rose. Overhead a film of southerly drifting mist draws a theatrical gauze across the firmament. The moonlight turns the lower straight into silver without a stain except where our shadow underruns us. Bristol and Cardiff double lights, those stately inclined beams over Severnmouth, are dead ahead of us, for we keep the southern winter route. Coventry Central, the pivot of the English system, stabs upward once in ten seconds its spear of diamond light to the north, and a point or two off our starboard bow, the leak, the great cloudbreaker of St. David's head, swings its unmistakable green beam twenty-five degrees each way. There must be half a mile of fluff over it in this weather, but it does not affect the leak. Our planet's over-lighted if anything, says Captain Ponyl at the wheel, as Cardiff Bristol slides under. I remember the old days of common white verticals that it would show two or three hundred feet up in a mist. If you knew where to look for them, in really fluffy weather they might as well have been under your hut. One could get lost coming home then, and have some fun. Now it's like driving down Piccadilly. He points to the billers of light where the cloudbreakers bore through the cloud floor. We see nothing of England's outlines, only a white pavement pierced in all directions by these manholes of variously colored fire, holy islands white and red, St. B's interrupted white, and so on, as far as the eye can reach. Blessed be Sergeant, Arons, and the Jubuah brothers who invented the cloudbreakers of the world whereby we travel in security. Are you going to leave for the shamrock? Yes, Captain Hudson. Cork light, green, fixed, enlarges as we rush to it. Captain Pernall nods. There is heavy traffic here about. The cloud bank beneath us is strict with running fissures of flame where the Atlantic boats are hurrying Londonward just clear of the fluff. Mail packets are supposed, under the conference rules, to have the five thousand foot lanes to themselves, but the foreigner in a hurry is up to take liberties with English air. 162 lifts to a long-drawn whale of the breeze in the fourth flange of the rudder, and we make Valencia, white, green, white, at a safe seven thousand feet, dipping our beam to an incoming Washington packet. There is no cloud on the Atlantic, and faint streaks of cream round Dingle Bay show where the driven seas hammer the coast. A big SATA liner, Société Anonyme de Transporte Réen, is diving and lifting half a mile below us in search of some break in the solid west wind. Lower still lies a disabled Dane. She is telling the liner all about it in international. Our general communication dial has got her talk and begins to eavesdrop. Captain Hudson makes a motion to shut it off, but checks himself. Perhaps he'd like to listen, he says. Our goal of St. Thomas, the Dane whimpers, report owners three starboard shaft-colour bearings fused, can make flurries as we are, but impossible further. Shall we buy spares at Fayall? The liner acknowledges and recommends inverting the bearings. The argo answers that she has already done so without effect, and begins to relieve her mind about cheap German enables for colour bearings. The Frenchman ascends cordially, cries, courage mon ami, and switches off. Their lights sink under the curve of the ocean. That's one of Lund and Blemer's boats, says Captain Hudson, who is right for putting German compost in their thrust blocks. She won't be in Fayall tonight. By the way, wouldn't you like to look around the engine room? I have been waiting eagerly for this invitation, and I follow Captain Hudson from the control platform, stooping low to avoid the bulge of the tanks. We know that flurries gas can lift anything, as the world-famous trials of 89 showed, but its almost indefinite powers of expansion necessitate vast tank room. Even in this thin air, the lift shunts are busy taking out one-third of its normal lift, and still 162 must be checked by an occasional down-draw of the rudder, or our flight would become a climb to the stars. Captain Pernell prefers an over-lifted tour and under-lifted ship, but no two captains stream ship alike. When I take the bridge, says Captain Hudson, you'll see me shunt 40% of the lift out of the gas and run her on the upper rudder. With the swoop upward instead of the swoop downward, as you say. Either way, we'll do. It's only habit. Watch our dip-dial. Tim Fetches her down once every 30 knots, as regularly as breathing. So is it shown on the dip-dial. For five or six minutes, the arrow creeps from 6700 to 7300. There is the faint G of the rudder, and backslides the arrow to 6000, on a falling slant of 10 or 15 knots. In heavy weather, you jockey hair with his cruise as well, says Captain Hudson. And unslipping the jointed bar, which divides the engine room from the bird deck, he leads me on to the floor. Here we find Flury's paradox of the bulk-headed vacuum, which we accept now without thought, literally in full blast. The three engines are HD&T, assisted vacuum of Flury turbines, running from 3000 to the limit. That is to say, up to the point when the blades make the air bell, cut out a vacuum for themselves precisely as over-driven marine propellers used to do. 162's limit is low, on account of the small size of her nine screws, which, though handier than the old colloid Thalesons, bell sooner. The midship's engine, generally used as a reinforce, is not running, so the port and starboard turbine vacuum chambers draw direct into the return mains, the turbines whistle reflectively. From the low arch expansion tanks on either side, the valves descend pillar-wise to the turbine chests, and then the obedient gas whirls through the spirals of blades, with a force that would whip the teeth out of a power saw. Behind is its own pressure, held in leash or spurred on by the lift shunt. Before it, the vacuum where Flury's ray dances in violet-green bands and world turbulence of flame. The jointed YouTubes of the vacuum chamber are pressure-tempered colloid. No glass would endure this train for an instant, and a junior engineer with tinted spectacles watches the ray intently. It is the very heart of the machine, a mystery to this day. Even Flury, who begot it, and, unlike Manek, died a multimillionaire, could not explain how the restless little imp shuddering in the YouTubes can, in the fractional fraction of a second, strike the fused blast of gas into a chill greyish-green liquid that drains. You can hear it trickle from the far end of the vacuum through the eduction pipes and the mains back to the bilges. Here it returns to its gases. One had almost written sagacious state and climbs to work afresh. Bilge tank, upper tank, dorsal tank, expansion chamber vacuum, main return as a liquid, and bilge tank, once more, is the ordained cycle. Flury's ray sees to that, and the engineer with the tinted spectacles sees to Flury's ray. If a speck of oil, if even the natural grease of the human finger touched the hooded terminals, Flury's ray will wink and disappear and must be laboriously built up again. This means half a day's work for all hands and an expense of 170 odd pounds to the GPO for radium salts and such trifles. Now, look at our thrust collars. You won't find much German compel there. Full jeweled, you see, says Captain Hudson, as the engineer shunts open the top of a cup. Our shaft bearings are CMC, Commercial Minerals Company stones, ground with as much care as the lens of a telescope. They cost 37 pounds apiece. So far we have not arrived at their term of life. These bearings came from number 97, which took them over from the old Dominion of Light, which had them out of the wreck of the Persia's aeroplane in the years when men still flew wooden kites over oil engines. They are a shining reproof to all low-grade German Ruby enamels, so-called word-facings, and the dangers and unsatisfactory aluminum compounds which please dividend-hunting owners and turn skippers crazy. Their rudder gear and the gas lift shunt seated side-by-side under the engine room dials are the only machines in visible motion. The former size from time to time as the oil plunger rises and falls half an inch. The latter, cased and guarded like the YouTube aft, exhibits another flurry ray, but inverted and more green than violet. Its function is to shunt the lift out of the gas and this it will do without watching. That is all. A tiny pump rod wheezing and winding to itself by the sputtering green lamp 150 feet aft down the flat-topped tunnel of the tanks, a violet light, restless and irresolute. Between the two, three white painted turbine trunks like eel baskets laid on their side accentuate the empty perspectives. You can hear the trickle of the liquefied gas flowing from the vacuum into the bilge tanks and the soft glock-glock of gas locks closing as Captain Pernall brings 162 down by the head, the hem of the turbines and the boom of the air on our skin is no more than a cotton wool wrapping to the universal stillness and we are running an 18-second mile. Up here from the fore end of the engine room over the hatch comings into the coach the male clerks are sorting the Winnipeg, Calgary and medicine hot bags, but there is a pack of cards ready on the table. Suddenly a bell thrills, the engineers run to the turbine valves and stand by, but the spectacled slave of the ray in the YouTube never lifts his head. He must watch where he is. We are heart-break and going astern. There is language from the control platform. Tim's sparking bodily about something, says the unruffled Captain Hudson. Let's look. Captain Pernall is not the suave man we left half an hour seems, but the embodied authority of the GPO. Ahead of us floats an ancient aluminum-patched twin-screw tram of the dingiest with no more right to the 5,000-foot lane than has a horse cart to a modern road. She carries an obsolete barbed conning tower, a six-foot affair with railed platform forward and a warning beam plays on the top of it as a policeman's lantern flashes on the area sneak. Like a sneak thief, too, emerges a shock-headed navigator in his shirt sleeves. Captain Pernall wrenches up in the colloid to talk with him, man to man. There are times when science does not satisfy. What under the stars are you doing here? You sky-scraping chimney-swip? He shouts as we two drift side by side.  You call yourself a sailor, sir? You ain't fit to pedal toy balloons to an Eskimo. Your name and number. Report and get down and be, I've been blown up once. The shock-headed man cries hoarsely as a dog barking. I don't care two flips of a contact for anything you can do, posty.  I'll have you towed stern first to disco and broke up. You can't recover insurance if you broke for obstruction. Do you understand that? Then the stranger bellows. Look at my propellers. There's been a woolly wah down below that has knocked us into umbrella frames. We've been blown up about 40,000 feet. We're all one conjures watch inside. My mate's arms broke. My engineer's heads cut open. My ray went out when the engine smashed and, and for pity's sake, give me my height, captain. We dud were dropping. 6800. Can you hold it? Captain Pernel overlooks all insults and leans half out of the colloid, staring and snuffing. The stranger leaks pungently. We owe to blow into St. John's with luck. We're trying to plug the four-tank now, but she's simply whistling it away, her captain wails. She's sinking like a log, says Captain Pernel, in an undertone. Call up the bank's markboat, George. Our dip dial shows that we, keeping abreast the trump, have dropped 500 feet the last few minutes. Captain Pernel presses a switch and our signal beam begins to swing through the night, to his link spokes of light across infinity. That'll fetch something, says while Captain Hudson watches the general communicator. He has called up the north bank's markboat, a few hundred miles west and is reporting the case. I'll stand by you, Captain Pernel roars, to the lone figure on the conning tower. Is it as bad as that, comes the answer. She isn't insured, she's mine. Might have guessed as much, matters Hudson. Owner's risk is the worst risk of all. Can't I fetch St. John's, even with his breeze, the voice quavers. Stand by to a badden ship. Haven't you any lift in you, four or aft? Nothing but the midship tanks, and they're none too tight. You see, my ray gave out and he cuffs in the reek of the escaping gas. You poor devil, this does not reach our friend. What does the markboat say, George? Wants to know if there are any danger to traffic, says she's in a bit of weather herself and can't quit station. I've turned to Ian a general call, so even if they don't see our beam, someone's bound to help, or else we must. Shall I clear our slings? Hold on, here we are. A planet liner too. She'll be up in a tick. Tell her to have her slings ready, cries his brother, Captain. There won't be much time to spare. Tie up your mate. He roars to the trump. My mate all right, it's my engineer. He's gone crazy. Shunt the lift out of him with a spanner, hurry. But I can make St. John's if you'll stand by. You'll make the deep wet Atlantic in twenty minutes. You're less than fifty-eight hundred now. Get your papers. A planet liner, eastbound, heaves up in a superb spiral and takes the air of us humming. Her underbody colloid is open and her transporter slings hang down like tentacles.  The mate comes up, his arms trapped to his side and stumbles into the cradle.  The mate assures him that he will find a nice new ray already in the liner's engine room. The bandaged head goes up, walking excitedly. A youth and a woman follow. The liner cheers hololily above us and we see the passengers' faces at the saloon colloid. That's a pretty girl. What's the fool waiting for now? says Captain Pernell. The skipper comes up, still appealing to us to stand by and see him fetch St. John's. He dives below and returns, at which we, little human beings, in the void cheer louder than ever with the ship's kitten. Up fly the liner's hissing slings. Her underbody crushes home and she hurtles away again. The dial shows less than three thousand feet. The mark boat signals we must attend to the derelict, now whistling her death song as she falls beneath us in long, sick zigzags. Keep our beam on her and send out a general warning, says Captain Pernell, following her down. There is no need. Not a liner in there but knows the meaning of that vertical beam and gives us, and our quarry, a wide berth. But she'll drown in the water once she, I ask. Not always, is his answer. I've known a derelict up-end and sifter engines out of herself and flicker round the lower lanes for three weeks on her forward tanks only. We'll run no risks. Peeth here, George, and look sharp. There's weather ahead. Captain Hudson opens the underbody colloid, swings the heavy, peething iron out of its rock, which in liners is generally cased as a smoking-room setty, and at two hundred feet releases the catch. We hear the weir of the crescent-shaped arms opening as they descend. The derelict's forehead is punched in, start across, and rent diagonally. She falls stern first, our beam upon her, slides like a lost soul down that pitiless sludder of light, and the Atlantic takes her. A filthy business, says Hudson. I wonder what it must have been like in the old days. The thought had crossed my mind, too. What if that wavering carcass had been filled with the men of the old days? Each one of them thought, that is the horror of it, that after death he would very possibly go forever to unspeakable torment, and scarcely a generation ago we, one knows now that we are only our fathers re-enlarged upon the earth. We, I say, ripped and rammed and peethed to admiration. Here, Tim, from the control platform, shouts that we are to get into our inflators and to bring him his at once. We hurry into the heavy rubber suits, the engineers are already dressed, and inflate at the air-pump taps. GPO inflators are thrice as thick as a racing man's flickers and chafe abominably under the armpits. George takes the wheel until Tim has blown himself up to the extreme of retentity. If you kicked him off the CP to the deck, he would bounce back, but it is 162 that will do the kicking. The mark-boats mad, stark-raving crazy, he snorts, returning to command. She says there's a bad blow-out ahead and wants me to pull over to Greenland. I'll see her peethed first.  What does she think a postal packet's made of? Gumped silk? Tell her we're coming on straight, George. George buckles him into the frame and switches on the direct control. Now, under Tim's left toe lies the port engine accelerator. Under his left heel, the reverse, and so with the other foot. The lift-shunt stops stand out on the rim of the steering wheel, where the fingers of his left hand can play on them. At his right hand is the midship's engine lever, ready to be thrown into gear at a moment's notice. He leans forward in his belt, eyes glued to the colloid, and one ear cocked toward the general communicator. Henceforth he is the strengthened direction of 162 through whatever may befall. The bank's marked boat is reeling out pages of ABC directions to the traffic at large. We are to secure all loose objects, hood up our flurry rays, and on no account to attempt to clear snow from our coning towers till the weather abates. Under powered craft, we are told, can ascend to the limit of their lift, mail packets to look out for them accordingly. The lower lanes westward are peating very badly with frequent blowouts, vortices, laterals, etc. Still, the clear dark holds up, unblemished. The only warning is the electric skin tension. I feel as though I were a lace maker's pillow and an irritability which the gibbering of the general communicator increases almost to hysteria. We have made 8000 feet since we peathed the trump and our turbines are giving us an honest 210 knots. Very far to the west, an elongated blur of red, low down, shows us the north bank's marked boat. There are specks of fire around her rising and falling, bewilder planets around an unstable sun, helpless shipping, hanging on to her light for company's sake. No wonder she could not quit station. She warns us to look out for the backwash of the bad vortex in which her beam shows it. She is even now reeling. The pits of gloom about us begin to fill with very faintly luminous films breathing and uneasy shapes. One forms itself into a globe of pale flame that waits shivering with eagerness till we sweep by. It leaps monstrously across the blackness, alights on the precise tip of our nose, pirouettes there an instant and swings off. A roaring bow sinks as though that light were led, sinks and recovers to large and stumble again beneath the next blowout. Tim's fingers on the lift shunt strike quads of numbers, one four seven, two four six, seven five three and so on, for he is running by his tanks only, lifting or lowering her against the uneasy air. All three engines are at work, for the sooner we have skated over this thin ice, the better. Higher we dare not go. The whole upper vault is charged with pale krypton vapors, which our skin friction may excite to unholy manifestations. Between the upper and lower levels, five thousand and seven thousand hints the mark boat. We may perhaps bolt through if our bow cloths itself in blue flame and falls like a sword. No human skill can keep base with the changing tensions. A vortex has us by the beak dived down a two thousand foot slant at an angle, the deep dial and my bouncing body recorded of thirty-five. Our turbines scream shrily, the propellers cannot bite on the thin air. Tim shunts the lift out of five tanks at once and by sheer weight drives her bullet wise through the maelstrom till she cushions with a jar on an up-gust three thousand feet below. Now we've done it, says George in my ear. Our skin friction, that last slide, has played old Harry with the tensions. Look out for laterals, Tim. She'll want some holding. I've got her, is the answer. Come up, old woman. She comes up nobly, but the laterals buffet her left and right like the pinions of angry angels. She is jolted off her course four ways at once and cuffed into place again only to be swung aside and dropped into a new chaos. We are never without a corpus and greening on our bows or rolling head over heels from nose to midships and to the crackle of electricity around and within us is added once or twice the rattle of hail, hail that will never fall on any sea. Slow we must, or we may break, our back pitch-polling. Air's a perfectly elastic fluid, roars George above the tumult. About as elastic as a head see off the fastenet, ain't it? He is less than just to the good element. If one intrudes on the heavens when they are balancing their vault accounts, if one disturbs the high God's market rates by hurling steel hulls at nighting-nots across tremblingly adjusted electric tensions, one must not complain of any rudeness in the reception. Tim met it with an unmoved countenance, one corner of his underlip caught up on a tooth, his eyes fleeting into the blackness twenty miles ahead and the fierce sparks flying knuckles at every turn of the hand. Now and again he shook his head to clear the sweat trickling from his eyebrows, and it was then that George, watching his chance would slide down the life-rail and swap his face quickly with a big red hunker-tiff. I never imagined that a human being could so continuously labour and so collectively think as did Tim through that hell's half hour when the flurry was at its worst. We were dragged hither and yon in thousand sanctions, belched up on the tops of woolly was, spun down by vortices and clubbed aside by laterals under a dizzying rush of stars in the company of a drunken moon. I heard the rushing click of the midship engine lever sliding in and out, the low growl of the lift shunts, and louder than the yelling winds without, the scream of the bow rudder gouging into any lull that promised hold for an instant.  Only the nicest balancing of tanks saved us from spinning like the rifle bullet of the old days. We've got to hitch to windward of that markboat somehow, George cried. There's no windward, I protested feebly, where I swung shackled to a stention. How can there be? He laughed. As we pitched into a thousand foot blowout, that red man laughed beneath his hood. Look, he said. We must clear those refugees with a high lift. The markboat was below and a little to the southwest of us, fluctuating in the center of her distraught galaxy. The air was thick with moving lights at every level. I take it most of them were trying to lie ahead to wind, but not being hydrous they failed. An under tanked Moograbi boat had risen to the limit of her lift, and finding no improvement dropped a couple of thousand. There she met a superb woolly-wha and was blown up spinning like a dead leaf. Instead of shutting off she went astern and, naturally, rebounded, as from her wall, almost into the markboat, whose language, our GC took it in, was humanly simple. If they'd only ride it out quietly it would be better, said George in a calm while we climbed like a bat above the moor. But some skippers will navigate without enough lift. What does that tad boat think she's doing, Tim? Playing kiss in the ring was Tim's unmoved reply. A trans-asiatic direct liner had found a smooth and batted into it full power. But there was a vortex at the tail of that smooth, so the TAD was flipped out like a pee from off a fingernail, breaking madly as she fled down and all but over-ending. Now I hope she's satisfied, said Tim. I'm glad I'm not a markboat. Do I want help? The general communicator, Dial, had caught his ear. George, you may tell that gentleman with my love. Love, remember, George, that I do not want help. Who is the officious sardine-team? A Rimauski-drogger on the lookout for a toe. Very kind of the Rimauski- drogger. This postal packet isn't being towed at present. Those droggers will go anywhere on a chance of solvage, George explained. We call them kiddie-wakes. A long, big, bright, still 90-footer floated at ease for one instant. Within hail of us, her slings coiled ready for rescues and a single hand in her open tower. He was smoking, surrendered to the insurrection of the air through which he tore our way. He lay in absolute pee. I saw the smoke of his pipe ascent and troubled her his boat dropped. It seemed like a stone in a well. He had just cleared the markboat and her orderly neighbors, when the storm ended as suddenly as it had begun. A shooting star to northward filled the sky with a green blink of a meteorite dissipating itself in her atmosphere. Said George, that may iron out all the tensions. Even as he spoke, the conflicting winds came to rest. The levels filled. The laterals died out in long, easy swells. The airways were smoothed before us. In less than three minutes the covey around the markboat had shipped their power lights and weared away upon their businesses. What's happened, I gasped. The nerve storm within and the vault tingle without had passed. My inflators weighed like lead. God he knows, said Captain George soberly. That old shooting star's skin friction has discharged the different levels. I've seen it happen before. Phew, what a relief. We dropped from ten to six thousand and got rid of our clammy suits. Team shut off and stepped out of the frame. The markboat was coming up behind us. He opened the colloid in that heavenly stillness and mopped his face. Hello, Williams, he cried. A degree or two out of station, ain't you? Maybe, was the answer from the markboat. I've had some company this evening. So I noticed. Wasn't that quite a little draft? I warned you. Why didn't you pull out north? The eastbound packets have. Me? Not till I'm running a polar consumptive sanatorium boat. I was squinting through a colloid before you were out of your cradle, my son. I'd be the last man to deny it. The captain of the markboat replied softly. The way you handled her just now? I'm a pretty fair judge of traffic in a vault hurry. It was a thousand revolutions beyond anything even I've ever seen. Teams back saples visibly to this oiling. Captain George, on the CP, wings and points to the portrait of the singularly attractive maiden pinned up on team's telescope bracket above the steering wheel. I see. Holy and entirely do I see. There is some talk overhead of coming round to tea on Friday, a brief report of the derelict's fate and sim volunteers as he descends. For an ABC man, young Williams is less of a high-tension fool than some. Were you thinking of taking care on, George? Then just have a look around that port thrust. Seems to me it's a trifle warm, and we'll jog along. The markboat hums off joyously and hunks herself up in her appointed airy. Here she will stay a shutterless observatory, a lifeboat station, a salvage dug, a quart of ultimate appeal cum-materialogical bureau for three hundred miles in all directions, till Wednesday next, when her relief slides across the stars to take her right place. Her black hull, double conning tower and ever-ready slings represent all that remains to the planet of that odd, old-word authority. She is responsible only to the aerial board of control, the ABC, of which teams speak so flippantly. But that semi-elected, semi-nominated body of a few score of persons of both sexes controls this planet, transportation is civilization, our motto is intelligence. Theoretically we do what we please, so long as we do not interfere with the traffic and all it implies. Practically the ABC confirms or annulles all international arrangements and, to judge from its last report, finds our tolerant, humorous, lazy little planet only too ready to shift the whole burden of public administration on its shoulders. I discuss this with team Sipping Maté on the CP while George fans her along over the wide blur of the banks in beautiful upward curves of 50 miles each. The deep dial translates them on the tape in flowing free hand. Team gathers up a scan of it and surveys the last few feet, which record 162's path through the vault flurry. I haven't had a fever shot like this to show up in five years, he says ruefully. A postal packet's deep dial records every yard of every run. The tapes then go to the ABC, which collates and makes composite photographs of them for the instruction of captains. Team studies his irrevocable past shaking his head. Hello? Here's a 1500 foot drop at 55 degrees. We must have been standing on our heads then, George. You don't say so, George answers. I fancy I noticed it at the time. George may not have Captain Pernell's cut-like swiftness, but he is all an artist to the tips of the broad fingers that play on the shunt stops. The deletious flight curves come away on the tape with never a waiver. The Mark Boat's vertical spindle of light lies down to eastward, setting in the face of the following stars. Westward, where no planet should rise, the triple verticals of Trinity Bay, we keep still to the southern route, make a low lifting haze. We seem the only thing at rest under all the heavens, floating at ease till the Earth's revolution shall turn up our landing towers. And minute by minute our silent clock gives us a 16 second mile. Some fine night, says Tim, will be even with that clock's master. He's coming now, says George over his shoulder. I'm chasing the night west. The stars ahead dim no more than if a film of mist had been drawn under and observed, but the deep air boom on our skin changes to a joyful sound. The dawn gust, says Tim. It'll go on to meet the sun. Look. Look. There is a dark being cramped back over our boughs. Come to the aftercolloid. I'll show you something. The engine room is hot and stuffy. The clerks and the coach are asleep, and the slave of the rave is ready to follow them. Tim slides up on the aftercolloid and reveals the curve of the world. The ocean's deepest purple, edged with fuming and intolerable gold. Then the sun rises and through the colloid strikes out our lumps. Tim scowls in his face. Squirrels in a cage, he mutters. That's all we are. Squirrels in a cage. He's going twice as fast as us. Just you wait a few years, my shining friend, and we'll take steps that will amaze you. Will George show you? Yes, that is our dream. To turn all earth into the veil on at our pleasure. So far we can drag out the dawn to twice its normal length in these latitudes. But someday, even on the equator, we shall hold the sun level in his full stride. Now we look down in a sea thronged with heavy traffic. A big submersible breaks water suddenly.  The deep sea freighters are rising to long up after the long night, and the leisurely ocean is all patented with peacock's eyes of foam. We'll long up too, says Tim, and when we return to the CP George shuts off, the colloids are opened, and the fresh air sweeps her out. There is no hurry. The old contracts that will be revised at the end of the year allow twelve hours for a run which any packet can put behind her in ten. So we breakfast in the arms of an easterly sland which pushes us along at a language twenty. To enjoy life and tobacco, begin both on a sunny morning, half a mile or so above the doubled Atlantic cloud belts, and after a vault flurry which has cleared and tempered your nerves. While we discuss the thickening traffic, with a superiority that comes of having a high level reserved to ourselves, we heard, and I for the first time, the morning hymn on a hospital boat. She was cloaked by a skein of raveled fluff beneath us, and we caught the chant before she rose into the sunlight. O ye winds of God, sang the unseen voices, bless ye the Lord, praise him and magnify him for ever. We sleet off our cups and joined in. When our shadow fell across her great open platforms, they looked up and stretched out their hands neighborly while they sang. We could see the doctors and the nurses and the white button-like faces of the caught patients. She passes slowly beneath us, heading northward, her hull wet with the dews of the night all ablaze in the sunshine. So took she the shadow of a cloud and vanished, her song continuing. O ye holy and humble men of heart, bless ye the Lord, praise him and magnify him for ever. She's a public longer, or she wouldn't have been singing the high-sity, and she's a Greenlander, or she wouldn't have snow-blinds over her colloids, said George at last. She'll be bound for Frederick Shabin, or one of the Glacier's Anatoriums for a month. If she was an accident ward, she'd be hanged up at the eight-thousand-foot level. Yes, consumptives. Funny how the new things are the old things. I've read in books, Tim answered, that savages used to haul their sick and wounded up to the hills, because microbes were fewer there. We hoisted them into sterilized air for a while. Same idea. How much do the doctors say we've added to the average life of a man? Thirty years, says George with a twinkle in his eye. Are we going to spend them all up here, Tim? Flap ahead then, flap ahead. Who's hindering? The Senior Captain laughed as we went in. We held a good lift to clear the coast-wise and continental shipping, and we had need of it. Though it is in no sense a populated one, there is a steady trinkle of traffic this way along. We met Hudson Bay furriers, out of the Great Preserve, hurrying to make their departure from Bonavista with sable and black fox for the insatiable markets. We over-crossed keyword-tint liners, small and cramped, but their captains, who see no land between Trapassi and Blanco, know what gold they bring back from West Africa. Trans-Asian directs we met, soberly ringing the world round the 15th Meridian, at an honoured 70 knots, and white patent acroyd and hand-fruits out of the south fled beneath us, their ventilated hulls whistling like Chinese kites. Their market is in the north, among the northern sanatoria, where you can smell their grapefruit and bananas across the cold snows. Argentine beef boats we sighted, too, of enormous capacity and unlovely outline. They, too, feed the northern health stations in ice-bound ports where submersibles dare not rise. Yellow-bellied ore-flats and un-gava petrol tanks punted down leisurely out of the north, like strings of unfrightened wild duck. It does not pay to fly minerals and oil a mile further than is necessary, but the risks of trans-shipping to submersibles in the ice-back of Nain or Hebron are so great that these heavy freighters fly down to Halifax Direct and send the air as they go. They are the biggest trumps aloft except the Athabasca grain-tubs, but these last, now that the wheat is moved, are busy over the world's shoulder, timber lifting in Siberia. We held to the St. Lawrence. It is astonishing how the old waterways still pull us children of the air and followed his broad line of black between its drifting ice-blocks all down the park that the wisdom of our fathers, but everyone knows the Quebec run. We dropped to the heights receiving towers twenty minutes ahead of time and there hang at ease till the Yokochoma Intermediate Packet could pull out and give us our proper sleep. It was curious to watch the action of the holding-down clips all along the Frosty River Front as the boats cleared or came to rest. The big hamburger was living pondly vise and her crew and shipping the platform railings began to sink Elsinor, the oldest of our Chanties. You know it, of course. Mother Ruggenste has on the Baltic forty-couple waltzing on the floor and you can watch my ray for I must go away and dance with Elaswayne at Elsinor. Then, while they sweated home the covering plates nor nor nor nor west from Surabaya to the Baltic ninety not an hour to the sco. Mother Ruggenste has on the Baltic and to dance with Elaswayne at Elsinor. The clips parted with a gesture of indignant dismissal as though Quebec, glittering under her snows, were casting out these light and unworthy lovers. Our signal came from the heights. Team turned and floated up but surely then it was with passionate appeal that the great tower arms flung open. Or did I think so because on the upper staging a little hooded figure also opened her arms wide toward her father. In ten seconds the coach with its clerks clashed down to the receiving caisson. The holsters displaced the engineers at the idle turbines and team, prouder of this than all introduced me to the maiden of the photograph on the shelf. And by the way, said he to her, stepping forth in sunshine under the light of civil life. I saw young Williams in the mark boat. I vast him to tea on Friday. Aerial board of control. Lights. No changes in English inland lights for week ending December the 18th. Cape Verde. Week ending December the 18th. Verde inclined guide light changes from first proxmo to triple flush, green, white, green in place of a colting red as heretofore. The warning light for Haramattan winds will be continuous vertical glare, white, on all oases of Trans-Saharan, north east by east main routes. In Vercargill, New Zealand from first proxmo extreme southerly light, double red will exhibit white beam inclined 45 degrees on approach on southerly buster. Traffic flies high off this coast between April and October. Table bay. Devil's peak glare removed to Simonsburg. Traffic making table mountain coast wise keep all lights from three anchor bay at least two thousand feet under and do not round to till east of east shoulder Devil's peak. Sand heads light. Green triple vertical marks new private landing stage for bay and Burma traffic only. Snaffle jockel. White a colting light withdrawn for winter. Patagonia. North summer light south Cape pillar. This includes Staten Island and Port Stanley. Cape Navarine. Quadruple fork flash. White one minute intervals. New. East Cape fork flash single white with single bomb 30 second intervals. New. Malayan Archipelago. Lights unreliable owing eruptions. Lay from Cape somerset Singapore direct keeping highest levels for the board. Cutter hun. St. Just. Van Header. Lights. Casualties. Week ending December 18th. Sable Island. Green single Barbet Tower freighter. Number indistinguishable upended and four tank pierced after collision past 300 feet level 2 p.m. December the 15th. Watched to water and peath by mark boat. NF banks. Postal packet 162 report Alma freighter. Fowley St. John's. Abandoned leaking after weather. 46 degrees 15 minutes north. 50 degrees 15 minutes west. Crew rescued by planet liner asteroid. Watched to water and peath by postal packet. December the 14th. Kirk Gillen. Mark boat reports last call from Symena freighter Gare Tonk Huck and Company taking water and sinking snowstorm south Mcdonald Islands. No wreckage recovered. Messages and wills of crew at all ABC offices. Pheasant. T. A. D. freighter Ulima taken ground during harmattan on Acacas range. Under plate strained crew at God were repairing December the 13th. Biscay. Mark boat reports Carducci. Valendingham line slightly spiked in western gorge point de Benask. Passengers transferred Andorra. Fulton line. Barcelona. Mark boat. Solving cargo December the 12th. Ascension. Mark boat. Wreck of unknown racing plane. Pardon rudder. Wire stiffened Xalanite vans. And Harleys engine seating. Sighted and solved. 7 degrees 20 minutes south. 18 degrees 41 minutes west. December the 15th. Photos at all ABC offices. Missing. No answer to general call having been received during the last week from following overdues. They are posted as missing. Atlantis. West. 17630. Conten Valparaíso. Out Humle. West. 889. Sakhom. Odessa. Berenice. West. 2206. Riga. Vladivostok. Treco. East. 446. Coventry. Punta Sarenas. Tontin. East. 3068. Cape Wrath. Ungava. Vusung. East. 41776. Hanco. Lobito Bay. General Call. All Mark Boats. Out 4. Jane Eyre. West. 690. Port Rupert. City of Mexico. Santander. West. 5514. Gobi Desert. Manila. The Edmondson. East. 9690. Candahar. Bermont. Borg for obstruction and quitting levels. Balkyrie. Racing Plane. AJ Hardley. Owner. New York. Twice Warned. Gaysha. Racing Plane. Esvancaut. Owner. Philadelphia. Twice Warned. Marvill of Peru. Racing Plane. JX Pejoto. Owner. Río de Janeiro. Twice Warned. For the board. Lazarev. Macau. routes. High-level sleet. The northern weather so far shows no sign of improvement. From all quarters come complaints of the unusual prevalence of sleet at the higher levels. Racing planes and deeks alike have suffered severely, the former from unequal deposits of half-frozen slush on their bands, and only those who have held up a badly balanced plane in a crosswind know what that means, and the latter from loaded boughs and snow-cased bodies. As a consequence the northern and northwestern upper levels have been practically abandoned, and the high-flyers have returned to the ignoble security of the three, five and six-hundred foot levels. But there remains a few undaunted sun-hunters who, in spite of frozen stays and ice-jumped connecting rods, still haunt the blue and purion. Bad boat racing. The scandals of the past few years have at last moved the yachting world to concerted action in regard to the bad boat racing. We have been treated to the spectacle of what are practically keeled racing planes driven a clear five-foot or more above the water, and only eased down to touch their so-called native element as they near the line. Judges and starters have been conveniently blind to this absurdity, but the public demonstration of St. Catherine's Light at the Oton regattas has borne ample if-tardy fruit. In the future the bad is to be a boat, and the long-unhidden demand of the true sportsmen for no daylight under meat-kill in smooth water is in a fair way to be conceded. The new rules severely restricts plain area and lift alike. The gas compartments are permitted both fore and aft as in the old type, but the water-ballast central tank is rendered obligatory. These things work, if not for perfection, at least for the evolution of a sane and wholesome water-borne cruiser. The type of rudder is unaffected by the new rules, so we may expect to see the long Davidson make, the patent in which has expired, come largely into use hands-forward, though the strain on the stern post in turning at speeds over 40 miles an hour is admittedly very severe. But bad boat racing has a great future before it. Crete and the ABC. The story of the recent Cretan crisis, as told in the ABC Monthly Report, is not without humour. Till the 25th of October, Crete, as all our planet knows, was the sole surviving European repository of autonomous institutions, local self-government, and the rest of the archaic lumber devised in the past for the confusion of human affairs. She has lived practically on the tourist traffic attracted by her annual pages of parliaments, boards, municipal councils, et cetera, et cetera. Last summer the islanders grew weary, as their premier explained, of playing at being savages for pennies, and proceeded to pull down all the landing-towers on the island, and shut off general communication till such time as the ABC should annex them. For side-splitting comedy, we would refer our readers to the correspondence between the Board of Control and the Cretan premier during the war. However, all's well that ends well. The ABC have taken over the administration of Crete on normal lines, and tourists must go elsewhere to witness the debates, resolutions, and popular movements of the old days. The only people to suffer will be the Board of Control, which is grievously overworked already. It is easy enough to condemn the Cretans for the laziness, but when one recalls the large, prosperous, and presumably public-spirited communities which during the last few years have deliberately thrown themselves into the hands of the ABC, one cannot be too hard upon St. Paul's old friends. Correspondence Skylarking on the Equator To the editor On the last week, while crossing the Equator, West 2615, I became aware of a furious and irregular cannonading, some 15 or 20 knots south, four east. Descending to the 500 feet level, I found a party of Transylvanian tourists engaged in exploding scores of the largest pattern-atmospheric bombs, ABC's standard, and in the intervals of their pleasing labours, firing bow and stern smoke-ring swivels. This orgy, I can give it another name, went on for at least two hours, and naturally produced violent electric derangements. My compasses, of course, were thrown out, my bow was struck twice, and I received two risk shocks from the lower platform rail. On remonstrating, I was told that these professors were engaged in scientific experiments. The extent of their scientific knowledge may be judged by the fact that they expected to produce, I give their own words, a little blue sky, if they went on long enough. This, in the heart of the doldrums, at 450 feet. I have no objection to any amount of blue sky in its proper place. It can be found at the 4000th level, for practically twelve months out of the year, but I submit, with all deference to the educational needs of Transylvania, that sky-larking, in the centre of a main travelled road, where, at the best of times, electricity, literally drips off one's stanchions and screw-blades, is unnecessary. When my friends had finished, the road was seared and blown, and pitted with unequal pressure layers, spirals, vortices, and readjustments for at least an hour. I pitched badly twice in an upward rush, solely due to these diabolical throw-downs that came near to wrecking my propeller. Equatorial work, at low levels, is trying enough, in all conscience, without the added terrors of scientific hooliganism in the doldrums. Aril, Javins and Muthon. We entirely sympathise with Professor Muthon's views, but still the board says fit to further regulate the southern areas in which scientific experiments may be conducted, which shall always be exposed to the risk which our correspondent describes. Unfortunately, a chimera-bombinating in a vacuum is, nowadays, only too capable of producing secondary causes. Editor. Answers to Correspondents. Vigilance. The laws of auroral derangements are still imperfectly understood. Any overheated motor may, of course, seize without warning, but so many complaints have reached us of accidents similar to yours, while shooting the aurora, that we are inclined to believe, with Laval, that the upper strata of the aurora borealis are practically one big electric leak, and that the paralysis of your engines was due to complete magnetisation of all metallic parts. Low-flying planes often glue up when near the magnetic pole, and there is no reason in science why the same disability should not be experienced in higher levels when the auroras are delivering strongly. Indignant. On your own showing, you were not under control, that you could not hoist the necessary NUC lights and approaching a traffic lane because your electrics had short-circuited, is a misfortune, which might befall anyone. The A.B.C., being responsible for the planet's traffic, cannot, however, make allowance for this kind of misfortune. A reference to the code will show that you were fined on the lower scale. Planniston, one, the 5,000-kilometre overland, was won last year by L.V. Roach, R.M. Roach, his brother, in the same week pulling off the 10,000, overseas. R.M.'s average worked out at a fraction over 500 kilometers per hour, thus constituting a record. 2. Theoretically, there is no limit to the lift of a dirigible. For commercial and practical purposes, 15,000 tons is accepted as the most manageable. Paterfamilias. None whatever. He is liable for direct damage both to your chimneys and any collateral damage caused by fall of bricks into garden, etc., etc. Badeline convenience and mental anguish may be included, but the average courts are not, as a rule, swayed by sentiment. If you can prove that his grapnel removed any portion of your roof, you had better rest your case on the coverage of domicile. C. Parkinans vs. Dubule. We sympathize with your position, but the night of the fourteenth was stormy and confused, and you may have to anchor on a stranger's chimney yourself some night. Verbum sap. Aldebaran. One. War, as a paying concern, seized in 1967. Two. The Convention of London expressly reserves to every nation the right of waging war so long as it does not interfere with the traffic and all that implies. Three. The ABC was constituted in 1949. LMD. One. Keep your full head on and half power, taking advantage of the lulls to speed up and creep into it. She will strain much less this way than in quartering across a gale. Two. Nothing is to be gained by reversing into a following gale, and there is always risk of a turnover. Three. The formulae for stencil brakes are uniformly unreliable and will continue to be so as long as air is compressible. Pegamoid. One. Personally, we prefer glass or flax compounds to any other material for winter work nosecaps as being absolutely non-hygroscopic. Two. We cannot recommend any particular make. Pulmoner. One. For the symptoms you describe, try the Gobi Desert sanatoria. The low levels of most of the Saharan sanatoria are against them, except at the outset of the disease. Two. We do not recommend boarding houses or hotels in this column. Beginner. On still days the air above a large inhabited city, being slightly warmer, i.e. thinner, than the atmosphere of the surrounding country, a plane drops a little on entering the rarefied area. Precisely as a ship sinks a little in fresh water, hence the phenomena of jolt and your inexplicable collisions with factory chimneys. In air, as in earth, it is safest to fly high. Emergency. There is only one rule of the road in air, earth and water. Do you want the firmament to yourself? Pikiola. Both poles have been overdone in art and literature. Give them to science for the next 20 years. You did not send a stump with your verses. North Nigeria. The mark boat was within her ride, in warning you off the reserve. The shadow of a low-flying dirigible scares the game. You can buy all the photos you need at Sokoto. New Era. It is not etiquette to overcross an ABC officials boat without asking permission. He is one of the body responsible for the planet's traffic, and for that reason must not be interfered with.  For humanity's sake, don't try to be democratic. Excoriated. All inflators chafe sooner or later, you must go on till your skin hardens by practice, meanwhile, bustling. Review. The Life of Xavier Laval. Reviewed by René Talon. Ecole Ironautique Paris. Even years ago, Laval, that imperturbable dreamer of the heavens, as Lazarev hailed him, gathered together the fruits of a lifetime's labor and gave it, with well-justified contempt, to a world-bound hand and foot to borrowed theory of vertices and compensating electric nodes. They shall see, he wrote, in that immortal post-script to the heart of the cyclone, the laws whose existence they derided, written in fire beneath them. But even here, he continues, there is no finality. Better a thousand times my conclusion should be discredited, than that my dead name should lie across the threshold of the Temple of Science, a bar to further inquiry. So died Laval, her prince of the powers of the air, and even in his funeral, Salier gestated him who had gone to discover the secrets of the Aurora Borealis. If I choose thus to be banal, it is only to remind you that Salier's theories are today as exploded as the ludicrous deductions of the Spanish school. In the place of their fugitive and warring dreams, we have, definitely, Laval's law of the cyclone, which he surprised in darkness and cold at the foot of the overarching throne of the Aurora Borealis. It is there that I, intent on my own investigations, have passed and re-passed a hundred times the worn Leonine face white as the snow beneath him, furrowed with wrinkles like the seams and gushes upon the North Cape, the nervous hand, integrally a part of the mechanism of his flightor, and above all, the wonderful lumbent eyes turned to the zenith. Master, I would cry as I moved respectfully beneath him. What is it you seek today? And all was the answer clear and without doubt from above. The old secret, my son. The immense egotism of youth forced me on my own path, but, cry of the human always, had I known?  It is to the filial piety of Victor Laval that we owe the two volumes consecrated to the grand life of his father, so full of the holy intimacies of the domestic hearth. Once returned from the abysms of the uttered North to the little house upon the outskirts of Muden, it was not the philosopher, the daring observer, the man of iron energy that imposed himself on his family, but a fat and even plaintive jester, a farceur incarnate and kindly the co-equal of his children. And it must be written, not seldom, the comic despair of Madame Laval, who, as she writes five years after the marriage to her vulnerable mother, found in this unequaled intellect, whose name I bear, the abandon of a large and very untidy boy. Here is her letter. Xavier returned from I do not know where at midnight, absorbed in calculations on the eternal question of his aurora, la belle aurora, whom I begin to hate. Instead of anchoring, I had set out the guide-light above a roof, so he had but to descend and fasten the plane. He wandered, profoundly distracted, above the town, with his anchor down. Figure to yourself, dear mother, it is the roof of the mayor's house that the grapnel first engages. That I do not regret, for the mayor's wife and I are not sympathetic. But when Xavier outputs my pet aurora-carrier and burrs it across the garden into the conservatory, I protest at the top of my voice. Little Victor, in his nightclothes, runs to the window, enormously amused at the parabolic flight without reason, for it is too dark to see the grapnel of my prized tree. The mayor of mutant, thunders at our door, in the name of the law, demanding, I suppose, my husband's head. Here is a conversation through the megaphone. Xavier is two hundred feet above us. Monsieur Laval, descend and make reparation for outrage of domicile. Descend, Monsieur Laval. No one answers. Xavier Laval, in the name of the law, descend and submit to process for outrage of domicile. Xavier rives from his calculations, comprehending only the last words. Outrage of domicile? My dear mayor, who is the man that has corrupted thy Julie, the mayor furious. Xavier Laval! Xavier interrupting. I have not that felicity. I am only a dealer in cyclones. My faith, he raised one then, all mutant attended in the streets, and my Xavier, after a long time comprehending what he had done, excused himself in a thousand apologies. At last the reconciliation was affected in our house over a supper at two in the morning. Julie, in a wonderful costume of compromises, and I have her and the mayor pacified in bed in the blue room. And on the next day, while the mayor builds his roof, her Xavier departs anew for the Aurora Borealis, there to commence his life's work. Monsieur Victor Laval tells us of that historic collision and plan on the flank of Hecla between Herrera, then a pillar of the Spanish school, and the lesson to confute his theories and lead him intellectually captive. Even through the years, the immense laugh of Laval, as he sustains the Spaniard's wrecked plane and cries, Courage! I shall not fall till I have found truth, and I hold you fast, rings like the call of trumpets. This is that Laval, whom the world immersed in speculations of immediate gain, did not know nor suspect, the Laval whom they adjudged to the last, a pedant and a theorist. The human, as apart from the scientific side, developed in his own volumes of his epoch-making discoveries, is marked with a simplicity, clarity and good sense beyond praise. I would specially refer, such as doubt the sustaining influence of unsettled faith upon character and will, to the eleventh and fifteenth chapters, in which are contained the opening and consummation of the Tillerianical records extending over nine years. Of their tremendous significance, be sure that the modest house at Mewden knew as little as that the records would one day be the planet's standard in all official meteorology. It was enough for them that their Xavier, this son, this father, this husband, ascended periodically to commune with powers, it might be angelic, beyond their comprehension, and that they united daily in prayers for his safety. Pray for me, he says, upon the eve of each of his excursions, and returning with an equal simplicity, he renders thanks, after supper in the little room where he kept his barometers. To the last, Laval was a Catholic of the old school, accepting, he who had looked into the very heart of the lightnings, the dogmas of papal infallibility, of absolution, of confession, of relics great and small, marvellous, enviable contradiction. The completion of the Tillerianical records, close to what Laval himself was pleased to call the theoretical side of his labours. Labours from which the youngest and least impressionable planure might well have shrunk. He had traced through cold and heat across the dips of the oceans with instruments of his own invention over the inhospitable heart of the polar ice and the sterile visage of the desert, league by league, patiently and weirdly, remorselessly, from their ever-shifting cradle under the magnetic bolt to their exalted deathbed in the atmost ether of the upper atmosphere, each one of the isochonic Tillerians' Laval's curves, as we call them today. He had disentangled the nodes of their intersections, assigning to each its regulated period of flux and reflux. Thus equipped, he summons Herrera and Tinsley, his pupils, to the final demonstration, as calmly as though he were ordering his flighters for some mid-day journey to Merseille. I have proved my thesis, he writes. It remains now only that you should witness the proof. We go to the Manila tomorrow. A cyclone will form off the Pescadores, south 17 east in four days, and will reach its maximum intensity twenty-seven hours after inception. It is there I will show you the truth. A letter heretofore unpublished from Herrera to Madame Laval tells us how the master's prophecy was verified. I will not destroy its simplicity or its significance by any attempt to quote. Note well, though, that Herrera's preoccupation throughout that day and night of superhuman strain is always for the master's bodily health and comfort. At such a time, he writes, I forced the master to take the broth, for I made him put on the fur coat, as you told me. Nor is Tinsley, C-pages 184-85, less concerned. He prepares the nourishment. He cooks eternally, imperturbably, suspended in the chaos of which the master interprets the meaning. Tinsley, bowed down with the laurels of both hemispheres, raises himself to get nobler heights in his capacity of a devoted chef. It is almost unbelievable, and yet, men right of the master are scald, aloof, self-contained. Such characters do not elicit the joyous and unswerving devotion which Laval commanded throughout life. Truly, we have changed very little in the course of the ages. The secrets of Earth and Sky and the links that bind them, we felicitate ourselves we are on the road to discover, but our neighbors' heart and mind we misread, we misjudge, we condemn, now as ever. Let all then, who love a man, read these most human, tender and wise volumes. End of section 7