XIV. MAIL PLANE

In the lee of the tin shed squat an old man and two women muffled to the eyes in tallow-colored rags. A mechanic kneading a piece of waste between his hands is kidding them about pork in a gentle drawl of French mixed with pidgin Arabic. Everybody shivers in the huge flow of cold east wind. At last the plane comes skimming the roll of the bare Moroccan hills. The women giggle behind their veils. In the name of God, says the old man and looks impassively at the passenger and the bags of mail and at the propeller blades that jerk round more slowly and more slowly, become two and stop. The passenger climbs in and huddles facing a thinfaced melancholy man with goggles; they drop in the mail, then the engine roars, the tin shed runs away, the hills waltz slowly, and white Tangier and the Straits and the Atlantic and the black cloud-dribbling mountains of the Riff spin gradually away, dropping in a lopsided spiral. The plane bounces like a ball across a snowy floor of white clouds. You’re very cold and a little sick and the hours trundle by endlessly until all at once you are being sucked into a vortex of flying mist and sunny red plowed land and yellow and white houses, you circle the bull ring and it’s Malaga. No time for lunch.

At Alicante the passenger sits drinking Fundador with the pilot in a kind of cabaret. On the stage stout ladies out of the past stamp tiredly to castagnettes, but at the table Mercedes (1926 model) slips into an empty chair. Her little black head is shingled, she makes goldy-round eyes like a cat at the talk of speed and cold airpockets.

In the hangover at dawn with hot eyes and dry tongues they start off again, grinding into the north wind.

Valencia through rifts in a snowstorm; then hours of bronze-green sea and rusty coasthills and a double corkscrew into Barcelona. No time for lunch.

North of the Pyrenees the air is thick like white soup. Over Cette the clouds are spouting in gigantic plumes. Trundle and swoop and sudden sideways skidding in the blinding whirl of a storm. It’s terribly cold. The earth is dissolved in swirling mist. No more restaurants, steam-heated seats in trains, election parades, red fire, beefsteaks. Nothing but the speed of whirling cold over an imaginary sphere marked with continents, canals, roadribbons, real estate lots. An earth weird as Mars, dead cold as the moon, distant as Uranus, where speed snaps at last like a rubber band. Huddled in a knot, hard and cold, pitched like a baseball round the world.… Until you meet yourself coming back and are very sick into your old black hat.