We lurched as we walked, owing to the stiffness that resulted from our having sat in the tiny cockpit for seventeen hours. Alcock, who during the whole period had kept his feet on the rudder bar and one hand on the control lever, would not confess to anything worse than a desire to stand up for the rest of his life--or at least until he could sit down painlessly. My hands were very unsteady. My mind was quite clear on matters pertaining to the flight, but hazy on extraneous subjects. After having listened so long to the loud-voiced hum of the Rolls-Royce motors, made louder than ever by the broken exhaust pipe on the starboard side, we were both very deaf, and our ears would not stop ringing. Later in the day we motored to Galway with a representative of the London _Daily Mail_. It was a strange but very welcome change to see solid objects flashing past us, instead of miles upon monotonous miles of drifting, cloudy vapor. Several times during that drive I lost the thread of connection with tangible surroundings, and lived again in near retrospect the fantastic happenings of the day, night and morning that had just passed. Subconsciously I still missed the rhythmic, relentless drone of the Rolls-Royce aëro-engines. My eyes had not yet become accustomed to the absence of clouds around and below, and my mind felt somehow lost, now that it was no longer preoccupied with heavenly bodies, horizon, time, direction, charts, drift, tables of calculations, sextant, spirit level, compass, aneroid, altimeter, wireless receiver and the unexpected. For a while, in fact, the immediate past seemed more prominent than the immediate present. Lassitude of mind, coupled with reaction from the long strain of tense and unbroken concentration on one supreme objective, made me lose my grip of normal continuity, so that I answered questions mechanically and wanted to avoid the effort of talk. The outstanding events and impressions of the flight--for example the long spin from four thousand to fifty feet, and the sudden sight of the white-capped ocean at the end of it--passed and repassed across my consciousness. I do not know whether Alcock underwent the same mental processes, but he remained very silent. Above all I felt the need of reëstablishing normal balance by means of sleep.