We landed at Leipzig, girdled by its wide belt of “arbor gardens,” theoretically to leave and pick up mail. But as there was none in either direction that morning, the halt was really made only to give the pilot time to smoke a cigarette. That finished, we were off again, rolling for miles across a wheat-field, then leaving the earth as swiftly as it had risen up to meet us ten minutes before. Landing and departure seem to be the most serious and time-losing tasks of the airman, and, once more aloft, the pilot settled down with the contentment of a being returned again to its native element. As we neared Berlin the scene below turned chiefly to sand and forest, with only rare, small villages. One broad strip that had been an artillery proving-ground was pitted for miles as with the smallpox. To my disappointment, we did not fly over the capital, but came to earth on the arid plain of Johannesthal, in the southernmost suburbs, the sand cutting into our faces like stinging gnats as we snorted across it to the cluster of massive hangars which the machine seemed to recognize as home. My companions took their leave courteously but quickly and disappeared within their billets. Another middle-aged woman despoiled me of my flying-togs, requested me to sign a receipt that I had been duly delivered according to the terms of the contract, and a swift automobile set me down, still half deaf from the roar of the airplane, at the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden—as it would have at any other part of Berlin I might have chosen—just three hours from the time I had been picked up at my hotel in Weimar.