Night Flight Read Online Free Page B

favored days when things go right of themselves and each successive message from the airports is another bulletin of victory. The Patagonia mail, too, was making headway; all the planes were ahead of time, for fair winds were bearing them northward on a favoring tide.
    â€œGive me the weather reports.”
    Each airport vaunted its fine weather, clear sky,
and clement breeze. The mantle of a golden evening had fallen on South America. And Rivière welcomed this friendliness of things. True, one of the planes was battling somewhere with the perils of the night, but the odds were in its favor.
    Rivière pushed the book aside.
    â€œThat will do.”
    Then, a night warden whose charge was half the world, he went out to inspect the men on night duty, and came back.
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    Later, standing at an open window, he took the measure of the darkness. It contained Buenos Aires yonder, but also, like the hull of some huge ship, America. He did not wonder at this feeling of immensity; the sky of Santiago de Chile might be a foreign sky, but once the air mail was in flight toward Santiago you lived, from end to journey’s end, under the same dark vault of heaven. Even now the Patagonian fishermen were gazing at the navigation lights of the plane whose messages were being awaited here. The vague unrest of an airplane in flight brooded not only on Rivière’s heart but, with the droning of the engine, upon the capitals and little towns.
    Glad of this night that promised so well, he recalled those other nights of chaos, when a plane had seemed hemmed in with dangers, its rescue well-nigh a forlorn hope, and how to the Buenos Aires Radio Post its desperate calls came faltering through, fused with the atmospherics of the storm. Under the leaden weight of sky the golden music of the waves was tarnished. Lament in the minor
of a plane sped arrowwise against the blinding barriers of darkness, no sadder sound than this!
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    Rivière remembered that the place of an inspector, when the staff is on night duty, is in the office.
    â€œSend for Monsieur Robineau.”
    Robineau had all but made a friend of his guest, the pilot. Under his eyes he had unpacked his suitcase and revealed those trivial objects which link inspectors with the rest of men; some shirts in execrable taste, a dressing set, the photograph of a lean woman, which the inspector pinned to the wall. Humbly thus he imparted to Pellerin his needs, affections, and regrets. Laying before the pilots eyes his sorry treasures, he laid bare all his wretchedness. A moral eczema. His prison.
    But a speck of light remained for Robineau, as for every man, and it was in a mood of quiet ecstasy that he drew, from the bottom of his valise, a little bag carefully wrapped up in paper. He fumbled with it some moments without speaking. Then he unclasped his hands.
    â€œI brought this from the Sahara.”
    The inspector blushed to think that he had thus betrayed himself. For all his chagrins, domestic misadventures, for all the gray reality of life he had a solace, these little blackish pebbles—talismans to open doors of mystery.
    His blush grew a little deeper. “You find exactly the same kind in Brazil.”
    Then Pellerin had slapped the shoulder of an
inspector poring upon Atlantis and, as in duty bound, had asked a question.
    â€œKeen on geology, eh?”
    â€œKeen? I’m mad about it!”
    All his life long only the stones had not been hard on him.
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    Hearing that he was wanted, Robineau felt sad but forthwith resumed his air of dignity.
    â€œI must leave you. Monsieur Rivière needs my assistance for certain important problems.”
    When Robineau entered the office, Rivière had forgotten all about him. He was musing before a wall map on which the company’s airlines were traced in red. The inspector awaited his chief’s orders. Long minutes passed before Rivière addressed him, without turning his head.
    â€œWhat is your