Like all long-imagined experiences this one was far less exciting in realization than in anticipation. At the start I felt a slight tremor, about equal to the sensation of turning a corner a bit too swiftly in an automobile. Now and then, as I peered over the side at the shrunken earth, the reflection flashed upon me that there was nothing but air for thousands of feet beneath us; but the thought was no more terrifying than the average person feels toward water when he first sails out to sea. By the time Weimar had disappeared I felt as comfortably at home as if I had been seated on the floor of a jolting box-car—the parallel is chosen advisedly. I glanced through the morning paper, scribbled a few belated notes, and exchanged casual remarks in sign language with my companion. The roar of the machine made conversation impossible. Whenever a new town of any importance appeared on the animated relief map far below us, the pathfinder thrust a thumb downward at it and pointed the place out on the more articulate paper map in his hands. The view was much the same as that from the brow of a high mountain. I knew a dozen headlands in the Andes below which the world spread out in this same entrancing entirety, except that here the performance was continuous rather than stationary, as a cinema film is different from a “still” picture. To say that the earth lay like a carpet beneath would be no trite comparison. It resembled nothing so much as that—a rich Persian carpet worked with all manner of fantastic figures; unless it more exactly imitated the “crazy-quilt” of our grandmothers’ day, with the same curiously shaped patches of every conceivable form and almost every known color. Here were long narrow strips of brilliant green; there, irregular squares of flowery purple-red; beyond, mustard-yellow insets of ridiculously misshapen outlines; farther off, scraps of daisy-white, and between them all velvety brown patches that only experience could have recognized as plowed fields. I caught myself musing as to how long it would be before enterprising mankind took to shaping the surface of the earth to commercial purposes, advising the airmen by the form of the meadows to “Stop at Müller’s for gas and oil,” or to “See Smith for wings and propellers.” All the scraps of the rag-bag had been utilized by the thrifty quilt-maker. Corn-fields looked like stray bits of green corduroy cloth; wheat-fields like the remnants of an old khaki uniform; the countless forests like scattered pieces of the somber garb cast off after the period of family mourning was over; rivers like sections of narrow, faded-black tape woven fantastically through the pattern in ridiculously snaky attempts at decorative effect. Here and there the carpet was moth-eaten—where a crop of hay had recently been gathered. A forest that had lately been turned into telegraph poles seemed a handful of matches spilled by some careless smoker; ponds and small lakes, the