There is no more impressive fact of aviation than the speed at which the airman loses touch with _terra firma_. At one moment the subject of congratulations amid a press of people, a familiar landscape about him, hills for his horizon, a great plain for his environment; at the next, he is high above the earth, the familiar landmarks are almost blotted out, the people have disappeared from his sight. Benny had shaken hands perhaps with five hundred worthy souls at Chamonix, had written his name in fifty books, posed for his picture to excited acrobats who held quaking cameras, addressed blunt little speeches to the deputies, quaffed a stirrup-cup of hot spiced wine, been conscious of an environment of mighty mountains and majestic peaks, and then, in a flash, the picture was changed, the people had disappeared, the voices were lost to him, the very scene transformed. He rose a little to the north of the forbidding Aiguille du Géant and experienced just for an instant the sensation that he had not attained a sufficient altitude and must strike the dread pinnacles of the rock. This was an unnecessary alarm, for the ship responded quickly to a touch of the elevating plane, and he cleared the mountain by three hundred feet or more. Then he headed almost due east, as he had been told to do. The wind, capricious ever in the Valley of Chamonix, here became almost boisterous; and for the first time that day he discovered a vacuum, as it were a whirlpool of the ether, into which he was drawn, and for a few moments whirled about with a velocity which appalled him. One less skilful might have wrecked all at such a moment, and had it been so he would have gone down headlong amid the pinnacles of rock which stand attendant to the famous peak. Benny, however, was always prepared for such a happening as this, and despite that crude sensation of the swift descent he covered his balance almost immediately and put the ship due east again. He had saved himself, but for how long? The dread mountains, above which he must sail henceforth, would be fertile in such perils as this; the valleys he must cross would be death-traps to any but the most vigilant. Pride in his swift flight to Mont Blanc had seduced him to this easy confidence, which might undo all if uncorrected. He resolved to apply all the mental concentration of which he was capable to the one purpose of success, and taking the wheel firmly in his hands, he set his eyes toward the great mountains about Zermatt and would heed no other spectacle. It has been said that he was quite ignorant of the Alps, and, truly, a man more familiar with the scene would have better understood the wonder of the deed.