Delectations

One horrible morning in Japan we took off in complete darkness even though the official time was dawn. Low clouds scudded across Ashiya, the temperature was 32°F, snow and rain were falling at once, the wind was gusty, everything seemed cold and wet and dark. So we pounded down the runway through the slush and got airborne and tucked up the wheels and climbed into the bituminous void and were lurching through the snow flurries when suddenly the blackness and the turmoil ripped down away from us and we rose into the spotless azure of morning. The clouds below us fell away into a rose-drenched oriental carpet. There, to the east, poised on the edge of its orb, the great bronze sun bids welcome.

Bluie West Eight was a tilted strip at the head of a cul-de-sac fjord in southwest Greenland. One morning at about 2:30 we took off for Scotland but before we headed out on course there was one small detail to take care of, namely a piece of ice two miles tall. So, in the moonlit morning, we circle over the patch of water at the head of the fjord, patiently lifting the transatlantic gas load we have just taken on board. Fifteen minutes after takeoff we are ready to approach the ice cap. The lights of Bluie West are still beneath us as we head out towards the pallid prehistoric rampart of ice. It glides beneath us, a continental mass of frozen dull refulgence, the graveyard of a thousand expeditions, a vast and silent and mortal trap.

WR

About the Author

William F. Rickenbacker

One horrible morning in Japan we took off in complete darkness even though the official time was dawn. Low clouds scudded across Ashiya, the temperature was 32°F, snow and rain were falling at once, the wind was gusty, everything seemed cold and wet and dark. So we pounded down the runway through the slush and got airborne and tucked up the wheels and climbed into the bituminous void and were lurching through the snow flurries when suddenly the blackness and the turmoil ripped down away from us and we rose into the spotless azure of morning. The clouds below us fell away into a rose-drenched oriental carpet. There, to the east, poised on the edge of its orb, the great bronze sun bids welcome.

Bluie West Eight was a tilted strip at the head of a cul-de-sac fjord in southwest Greenland. One morning at about 2:30 we took off for Scotland but before we headed out on course there was one small detail to take care of, namely a piece of ice two miles tall. So, in the moonlit morning, we circle over the patch of water at the head of the fjord, patiently lifting the transatlantic gas load we have just taken on board. Fifteen minutes after takeoff we are ready to approach the ice cap. The lights of Bluie West are still beneath us as we head out towards the pallid prehistoric rampart of ice. It glides beneath us, a continental mass of frozen dull refulgence, the graveyard of a thousand expeditions, a vast and silent and mortal trap.