An Englishman Looks at the World: Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters — John Shaqi
An Englishman Looks at the World: Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary MattersWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
An Englishman Looks at the World: Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Great Britain -- Social conditions; Social problems; United States -- Social conditions
And as for the giddiness of looking down, one does not feel it at all.
It is difficult to explain why this should be so, but it is so. I
suppose in such matters I am neither exceptionally steady-headed nor is
my head exceptionally given to swimming. I can stand on the edge of
cliffs of a thousand feet or so and look down, but I can never bring
myself right up to the edge nor crane over to look to the very bottom. I
should want to lie down to do that. And the other day I was on that
Belvedere place at the top of the Rotterdam sky-scraper, a rather high
wind was blowing, and one looks down through the chinks between the
boards one stands on upon the heads of the people in the streets below;
I didn't like it. But this morning I looked directly down on a little
fleet of fishing boats over which we passed, and on the crowds
assembling on the beach, and on the bathers who stared up at us from the
breaking surf, with an entirely agreeable exaltation. And Eastbourne, in
the early morning sunshine, had all the brightly detailed littleness of
a town viewed from high up on the side of a great mountain.
When Mr. Grahame-White told me we were going to plane down I will
confess I tightened my hold on the sides of the car and prepared for
something like the down-going sensation of a switchback railway on a
larger scale. Just for a moment there was that familiar feeling of
something pressing one's heart up towards one's shoulders, and one's
lower jaw up into its socket and of grinding one's lower teeth against
the upper, and then it passed. The nose of the car and all the machine
was slanting downwards, we were gliding quickly down, and yet there was
no feeling that one rushed, not even as one rushes in coasting a hill on
a bicycle. It wasn't a tithe of the thrill of those three descents one
gets on the great mountain railway in the White City. There one gets a
disagreeable quiver up one's backbone from the wheels, and a real sense
of falling.
It is quite peculiar to flying that one is incredulous of any
collision. Some time ago I was in a motor-car that ran over and killed a
small dog, and this wretched little incident has left an open wound upon
my nerves. I am never quite happy in a car now; I can't help keeping an
apprehensive eye ahead. But you fly with an exhilarating assurance that
you cannot possibly run over anything or run into anything--except the
land or the sea, and even those large essentials seem a beautifully safe
distance away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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