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hand was turning now an empty hemicycle within whose compass so many things might have fitted in. To while away the interval Rivière went out and now the night seemed hollow as a stage without an actor. Wasted_a night like this! He nursed a grudge against the cloudless sky with its wealth of stars, the moon’s celestial beacon, the squandered gold of such a night....
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    But, once the plane had taken off, the night once more grew full of beauty and enthralment; for now the womb of night was carrying life, and over it Rivière kept his watch.
    â€œWhat weather have you?”
    He had the query transmitted to the crew. Ten seconds later the reply came in : “Very fine.”
    There followed a string of names, towns over which the plane had passed and, for Rivière’s ears, these were so many names of cities falling one by one before a conqueror.

VII
    An hour later the wireless operator on the Patagonia mail felt himself gently lifted as though some one were tugging at his shoulder. He looked around; heavy clouds were putting out the stars.
He leaned toward the earth, trying to see the village lights, shining like glowworms in the grass, but in those fields of darkness no light sparkled.
    He felt depressed; a hard night lay before him, marches and countermarches, advances won and lost. He did not understand the pilot’s tactics; a little further on and they would hit against that blackness, like a wall.
    On the rim of the horizon in front he now could see a ghostly flicker, like the glow above a smithy. He tapped Fabien’s shoulder, but the pilot did not stir.
    Now the first eddies of the distant storm assailed them. The mass of metal heaved gently up, pressing itself against the operator’s limbs; and then it seemed to melt away, leaving him for some seconds floating in the darkness, levitated. He clung to the steel bulwarks with both hands. The red lamp in the cockpit was all that remained to him of the world of men and he shuddered to know himself descending helpless into the dark heart of night, with only a little thing, a miner’s safety lamp, to see him through. He dared not disturb the pilot to ask his plans; he tightened his grip on the steel ribs and bending forward, fixed his eyes upon the pilot’s shadowed back.
    In that obscurity the pilot’s head and shoulders were all that showed themselves. His torso was a block of darkness, inclined a little to the left; his face was set toward the storm, bathed intermittently, no doubt, by flickering gleams. He could not see that face; all the feelings thronging there to meet the onset of the storm were hidden from his eyes; lips set with anger and resolve,
a white face holding elemental colloquy with the leaping flashes ahead.
    Yet he divined the concentrated force that brooded in that mass of shadow, and he loved it. True, it was carrying him toward the tempest, yet it shielded him. True, those hands, gripping the controls, pressed heavy on the storm, as on some huge beast’s neck, but the strong shoulders never budged, attesting vast reserves of force. And after all, he said to himself, the pilot’s responsible. So, carried like a pillion-rider on this breakneck gallop into the flames, he could relish to its full the solid permanence, the weight and substance implicit in that dark form before him.
    On the left, faint as a far revolving light, a new storm center kindled.
    The wireless operator made as if to touch Fabien’s shoulder and warn him, but then he saw him slowly turn his head, fix his eyes a while on this new enemy and then as slowly return to his previous position, his neck pressed back against the leather pad, shoulders unmoving as before.

VIII
    Rivière went out for a short walk, hoping to shake off his malaise, which had returned. He who had only lived for action, dramatic action, now felt a curious shifting of the crisis of the drama, toward his own personality. It came to him that the little people