PARIS 1897
It was a beautiful morning. The Eiffel Tower rose up into a cloudless sky. Crowds thronged the Champs-Elysées and the cafés, bonnets and parasols and top hats everywhere, and carriages were busy. A parade marched towards the Arc de Triomphe, the people cheering and flags waving. Then there was a new sound above the applause, and a blob came looming over the treetops, spluttering. It was a man flying a tricycle.
His name was Alberto Santos-Dumont. It was one of those newly-invented De Deon motor-tricycles; but the steering was connected to a canvas frame behind, like a ship’s rudder, and the engine turned a wooden propeller. Above this contraption floated a big egg-shaped silk balloon of hydrogen, from which the tricycle with the incumbent Alberto were suspended.
Alberto sailed low over the crowds, and all faces were upturned, delighted and waving. The air-cycle went buzzing and backfiring round the Arc de Triomphe, then it headed over the rooftops towards the Eiffel Tower. It rose higher and higher, then sailed ponderously round the mighty tower to roars of applause.
Whereupon Alberto wanted a drink. He came looming down towards the boulevards, spluttering between the treetops, making horses shy. Ahead was his favourite café. Alberto brought his flying machine down lower, and steered it towards a lamppost. He threw down a coil of rope, and his friends grabbed it and tied it to the lamppost. Alberto’s engine backfired, and died. The balloon-cycle was moored, hitched above the cobblestones like an elephant.
Alberto jumped down, and walked jauntily into the café, smiling and shaking hands.
ENGLAND 1929
Those were the days of glory and empires, when the statesmen of Europe carved up the world, planted their flags and brought law and order, and Christianity, to the heathen. Everything was well ordered, and if you looked at an atlas much of it was coloured red, for Great Britain, not red for communist as it would be coloured today. The world was full of adventure; and the vast wild places teemed with animals, the seas were full of fish and whales. This was only yesterday, only in your father’s day, and maybe in your own. The world was beautiful, and there were no oilslicks on the seas, no oil fumes hanging in the air, no pollution blowing across oceans to make acid rain in faraway places. In those days there were some dashing young men in flying machines, but it was before the age of air travel.
In a field outside the town of Bedford stood two great hangars. Inside one of them, hundreds of men were building a great airship, as long as two football pitches put end to end, great frames of aluminium covered in canvas, and its huge gasbags were made of ox-intestine, to be filled with hydrogen. The ship was being built by the government and it was called the R 101. Across country, in Yorkshire, another airship was being built by a private company for the government, and it was called the R 100. The R 100 was finished first, and she flew on her trials to Canada and back, to much acclaim. There was great urgency to finish the R 101 so she could carry the Secretary of State to India and back in time for the Empire’s Jubilee. But when the R 101 was tested, she was sluggish. So they cut her in half and added a whole new section to hold another huge gasbag. But there was not time for all her trials before she left.
It was a cold, rainy afternoon when the R 101 took off for India, with her famous personages aboard. She flew over London, and down in the streets people were waving madly. It was dark when she flew over the Channel, and the rain beat down on her. As she flew over the coastline of France the captain reported by radio to London that his famous passengers had dined well and retired to bed.
That was the last communication.
It is not known for certain why it happened but near Beauvais the great ship came seething down to earth out of the darkness. There was a shocking boom and the great frame crumpled and a vast balloon of flame mushroomed up, and then another and another, and the huge mass of buckled frames glowed red in the ghastly inferno.
There were only six survivors. The world was horrified. And, after the Commission of Inquiry, the other airship was dismantled in her hangar, and broken up with a steam-roller, and sold for scrap.
NEW JERSEY, AMERICA: 7 MAY 1937
In the late afternoon the monster appeared.
It came from the Atlantic, looming slowly larger and closer towards the skyscrapers of New York. It had huge swastikas emblazoned on its tail. It was over seven hundred feet long, a leviathan filled with seven million cubic feet of hydrogen. The sun shone silver on her mighty body, and down in the concrete canyons the people stared upwards, awed, and the passengers gazed down on beautiful Manhattan, the Hudson with steamships from all around the world, the Statue of Liberty, Long Island fading into distant mauve, America stretching away in the lowering sun: Her sister ship, the Graf Zeppelin, had made one hundred and thirty trans-Atlantic flights in the last nine years, but people never tired of seeing such massive beauty sailing so majestically through the sky. She was called the Hindenburg, and she was the newest prize of the German airfleet. She could carry seventy passengers, sleeping in real cabins and dining in a saloon at real tables with real cutlery, strolling along promenade decks, looking down on to the countrysides gliding quietly by below, so close they could even hear a dog bark and a train whistle.
There was a big crowd awaiting her at the Lakehurst airfield in New Jersey; the ground crew, people to meet the passengers, pressmen, sightseers. The sun was setting when she came into sight. She came through the darkening sky, slowly becoming larger and larger, the captain slowly bringing her down, and the crowd broke into a mass of waving.
The mooring mast was a high steel structure. The ship came purring across the airfield towards it, headed into the breeze, a wondrous silver monster easing down out of the sky; a rope came uncoiling out of her nose; the ground crew ran for it. There was the sound of an explosion; for an instant there was a hellish blue glow, then a great flame leapt upwards.
It exploded out of the stern, and in a moment most of the airship was engulfed in barrelling fire. Instantly half the canvas was gone and the frame glared naked in the sky; the flame mushroomed enormously upwards, yellow and black, and the stern began to fall. There was a second explosion and more flame shot up, the great ship shook. All the passengers knew was the terror, and the deck suddenly lurching away beneath them, and the terrible glare, and the heat. Now the flaming ship was falling to earth in a terrible slow-motion, stern first. There was a third explosion and the airship hit the ground, a blazing mass of frames and flames. The crowd was screaming, people were running to try to help and the radio commentator was weeping, ‘Oh my God … It’s terrible … I can’t watch it … All those people dying … Oh my God this is terrible …’
Some people leapt out before it hit the earth, some managed to fight their way out as it crashed. They came staggering out, reeling, on fire, twisting and beating themselves, roasting and crazed. The night was filled with flame and weeping and shouting.
It is always hot in the Zambesi Valley. From the hard escarpments the valley rolls away, descending through many hills, stretching on and on, mauve, fading into haze, like an ocean, so vast you cannot see the escarpments on the other side. It is a wonderful, wild valley, with elephant and lion and all the buck, and the river is hundreds of yards wide, with sandy banks and islands, and hippo, vundu fish as big as a man, big striped fighting tiger fish, and many crocodiles. The mighty river flows for thousands of miles, from the vast bushland of Angola in the west, over the Victoria Falls –
