The boy, impeded in his view by reason of his small proportions, wriggled in his straps so as to get his chin well over the gunwale of the Bird’s fuselage and the buffetting wind that was dug up and spaded over her bows by the dizzying revolutions of the tractor, got hold of him and pummelled and buffetted him again. Her course was still north, the sun was setting in great smoking lakes of gold and sulphur on her left as she flew. Thick patches of dark green bushes that probably were woods, reddish-green blotches that might be heathy commons, shiny, square patches that he guessed at as reservoirs, toybox villages that were thriving suburban boroughs, specks that were villas, glittering ribbons that suggested canals, and one broad shiny stripe that was a river with tiny boats upon it, were swirling from right to left, sweeping along in the opposite direction, under the rushing body of the winged thing that bore him, ruled by the hand of von Herrnung upon the steering-wheel. Behind her a chaotic, formless greyness brooded on the horizon, innumerable spires rose out of it and a glittering haze hung over all. That was London, the great grimy Mother of Cities tearing away from her little son at eighty miles an hour. The shriek of an engine and the rumble of a train reduced by distance to infinite tenuity pulled the boy’s eyes downwards. A weeny mechanical toy that meant one of the double-humped colossi of steam traction, dragging a string of match-box goods trucks, raced another locomotive, towing a crowded passenger-train neck and neck along the spider-fine perspective of gossamers that meant the Great Eastern Railway. Now fear was swamped in the sheer joy of the experience. This thin air that kept you perpetually gulping and swallowing saliva, made you feel more than ever how good it is to be alive. Billows and billows of green, interspersed with patches of purple heather, meant Epping Forest, though he did not know it. A great aggregation of grey walls and housetops, looking like a section of an old wasp’s nest, stood for Waltham Abbey as the Bird drove on. Quite a tangle of the shiny grey-blue streaks that were rivers meant Lea and Orwell, Ouse, and their trouty tributaries. East England rolled away underneath like an endless carpet woven in irregular patches of many hues. Green and brown, grey and yellow, and innumerable shades of these, so tempting in their suggestions of good things to eat that a most unheroic hunger reminded the schoolboy of tea-time, hours and hours gone by.