With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D.: (Together with extracts from the comtemporary magazine in which it appeared)Kipling, Rudyard
Science
With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D.: (Together with extracts from the comtemporary magazine in which it appeared)
Kipling, Rudyard
Aeronautics -- Fiction; Science fiction
To enjoy life, and tobacco, begin both on a sunny morning half a mile or
so above the dappled Atlantic cloud-belts and after a volt-flurry which
has cleared and tempered your nerves. While we discussed the thickening
traffic with the superiority that comes of having a high level reserved
to ourselves, we heard (and I for the first time) the morning hymn on a
Hospital boat.
She was cloaked by a skein of ravelled fluff beneath us and we caught
the chant before she rose into the sunlight. "_Oh, ye Winds of God_,"
sang the unseen voices: "_bless ye the Lord! Praise Him and magnify Him
forever!_"
We slid off our caps and joined in. When our shadow fell across her
great open platforms they looked up and stretched out their hands
neighbourly while they sang. We could see the doctors and the nurses and
the white-button-like faces of the cot-patients. She passed slowly
beneath us, heading northward, her hull, wet with the dews of the night,
all ablaze in the sunshine. So took she the shadow of a cloud and
vanished, her song continuing. _Oh, ye holy and humble men of heart,
bless ye the Lord! Praise Him and magnify Him forever._
"She's a public lunger or she wouldn't have been singing the
_Benedicite_; and she's a Greenlander or she wouldn't have snow-blinds
over her colloids," said George at last. "She'll be bound for
Frederikshavn or one of the Glacier sanatoriums for a month. If she was
an accident ward she'd be hung up at the eight-thousand-foot level.
Yes--consumptives."
"Funny how the new things are the old things. I've read in books," Tim
answered, "that savages used to haul their sick and wounded up to the
tops of hills because microbes were fewer there. We hoist 'em into
sterilized air for a while. Same idea. How much do the doctors say we've
added to the average life of a man?"
"Thirty years," says George with a twinkle in his eye. "Are we going to
spend 'em all up here, Tim?"
"Flap along, then. Flap along. Who's hindering?" the senior captain
laughed, as we went in.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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