Benny’s heart warmed when he depicted the great crowds upon the plateau of Andana; the enthusiasm he must excite and the criticism to which he would be subject. Some, no doubt, would deride him—he was prepared for that. A few would be openly incredulous, but he hoped none the less to win friendship by his initiative, and the possibilities of victory remained. Let it come to that and his fortune was made. He believed that by money his genius would conquer the world. The humblest of men as he appeared to others, his secret ambitions surpassed all reason, and were of themselves an ironic commentary upon an ancient text. He was vain, truly, and yet vanity ceased to afflict him when the need of other qualities arose. Standing there upon the summit of the Zaat, a lonely figure of the night, apart from men and the world, Benny quickly dismissed the phantom multitude and settled down to the cold logic of his task. A powerful electric lamp, fixed to the snout of the machine, focused an aureole upon his map of the Pennine Alps and confirmed its verities. He began to think of winds and weather, of what he would do in a west wind and what in a south. Determined to start very early in the day, he thought he would steer right across the plateau toward Mont Blanc; then head for the Matterhorn and, passing high above Zermatt, would return by the Weisshorn to Sierre and the plateaus. One of the conditions of flight stipulated that he must cross a high peak and start once unaided from any spot he cared to choose. Benny determined to choose Chamonix for this purpose; to descend at the foot of Mont Blanc, and thence to begin the second stage across the Matterhorn. Perilous truly such a flight must be, perilous beyond any in the story of aviation; but of peril he thought little for he had lived for such an hour as this—and it mattered not what befell him if he failed. He smoked a pipe at the summit of the Zaat and tried to forget how very cold it was. Far from being a romantic person in the abstract sense of the term, his imagination delighted in the isolation of his position and the mastery which genius had conferred upon him. Other men climbed to this height laboriously. He had heard them talking about it in the hotels, planning excursions upon skis and calculating the hours necessary for the expedition. Often they had left the Palace at eight o’clock of the morning and returned when it was quite dark. He himself had been six minutes in attaining the same position, and he could descend to the chalet in three if he chose. Pardonable vanity became something very like egotism of an unpleasant nature at that particular moment; and when he put his pipe into his pocket and spread his wings again, he was a different person from the nervous hesitating nobody who had addressed Mrs. Kennaird that morning.