The sound of the distant engine swelled and thickened; a sound of ripening. Lights flashed out. The red lamps on the light-tower silhouetted a hangar, radio standards, a square landing ground. The setting of a gala night.
“There she comes!”
A sheaf of beams had caught the grounding plane, making it shine as if brand-new. No sooner had it come to rest before the hangar than mechanics and airdrome hands hurried up to unload the mail. Only Pellerin, the pilot, did not move.
“Well, aren’t you going to get down?”
The pilot, intent on some mysterious task, did not deign to reply. Listening, perhaps, to sounds that he alone could hear, long echoes of the flight. Nodding reflectively, he bent down and tinkered with some unseen object. At last he turned toward the officials and his comrades, gravely taking stock of them as though of his possessions. He seemed to pass them in review, to weigh them, take their measure, saying to himself that he had earned his right to them, as to this hangar with its gala lights and solid concrete and, in the offing, the city, full of movement, warmth, and women. In the hollow of his large hands he seemed to hold this folk; they were his subjects, to touch or hear or curse, as the fancy took him. His impulse now was to curse them for a lazy crowd, so sure of life they seemed, gaping at the moon; but he decided to be genial instead.
Then he climbed down.
He wanted to tell them about the trip.
“If only you knew...!”
Evidently, to his thinking, that summed it up, for now he walked off to change his flying gear.
As the car was taking him to Buenos Aires in the company of a morose inspector and Rivière in silent mood, Pellerin suddenly felt sad; of course, he thought, it’s a fine thing for a fellow to have gone through it and, when he’s got his footing again, let off a healthy volley of curses. Nothing finer in the world! But afterwards ... when you look back on it all; you wonder, you aren’t half so sure!
A struggle with a cyclone, that at least is a straight fight, it’s real. But not that curious look things wear, the face they have when they think they are alone. His thoughts took form. “Like a revolution it is; men’s faces turning only the least shade paler, yet utterly unlike themselves.”
He bent his mind toward the memory.
He had been crossing peacefully the Cordillera of the Andes. A snow-bound stillness brooded on the ranges; the winter snow had brought its peace to all this vastness, as in dead castles the passing centuries spread peace Two hundred miles without a man, a breath of life, a movement; only sheer peaks that flying at twenty thousand feet you almost graze straight-falling cloaks of stone, an ominous tranquility.
It had happened somewhere near the Tupungato Peak....
He reflected.... Yes, it was there he saw a miracle take place.
For at first he had noticed nothing much, felt no more than a vague uneasiness—as when a man believes himself alone, but is not; some one is watching him. Too late, and how he could not comprehend, he realized that he was hemmed in by anger. Where was it coming from, this anger? What told him it was oozing from the stones, sweating from the snow? For nothing seemed on its way to him, no storm was lowering. And still—another world, like it and yet unlike, was issuing from the world around him. Now all those quiet-looking peaks, snowcaps, and ridges, growing faintly grayer, seemed to spring to life, a people of the snows. And an inexplicable anguish gripped his heart.
Instinctively he tightened his grasp on the controls. Something he did not understand was on its way and he tautened his muscles, like a beast about to spring. Yet, as far as eye could see, all was at peace. Peaceful, yes, but tense with some dark potency.
Suddenly all grew sharp; peaks and ridges seemed keen-edged prows cutting athwart a heavy head wind. Veering around him, they deployed like dreadnoughts taking their positions in a battle line. Dust began to mingle with the air, rising and hovering, a veil above the snow. Looking back to see if retreat might still be feasible, he shuddered; all the Cordillera behind him was in seething ferment.
“I’m lost!”
On a peak ahead of him the snow swirled up into the air—a snow volcano. Upon his right flared up another peak and, one by one, all the summits grew lambent with gray fire, as if some unseen messenger had touched them into flame. Then the first squall broke and all the mountains round the pilot quivered.
Violent action leaves little trace behind it and he had no recollection of the gusts that buffeted him then from side to side. Only one clear memory remained; the battle in a welter of gray flames.
He pondered.
“A cyclone, that’s nothing. A man just saves his skin! It’s what comes before it—the thing one meets upon the way!”
But already, even as he thought he had recalled it, that one face in a thousand, he had forgotten what it was like.