I had begun with a glider that I
imagined was on the lines of the Wright brothers' aeroplane, but I could
not be sure. It might turn over. I might upset it. It might burrow its
nose at the end and smash itself and me. The conditions of the flight
necessitated alert attention; it wasn't a thing to be done by jumping
off and shutting one's eyes or getting angry or drunk to do it. One
had to use one's weight to balance. And when at last I did it it was
horrible--for ten seconds. For ten seconds or so, as I swept down the
air flattened on my infernal framework and with the wind in my eyes, the
rush of the ground beneath me filled me with sick and helpless terror;
I felt as though some violent oscillatory current was throbbing in brain
and back bone, and I groaned aloud. I set my teeth and groaned. It was
a groan wrung out of me in spite of myself. My sensations of terror
swooped to a climax. And then, you know, they ended!

Suddenly my terror was over and done with. I was soaring through the air
right way up, steadily, and no mischance had happened. I felt intensely
alive and my nerves were strung like a bow. I shifted a limb, swerved
and shouted between fear and triumph as I recovered from the swerve and
heeled the other way and steadied myself.

I thought I was going to hit a rook that was flying athwart me,--it
was queer with what projectile silence that jumped upon me out of
nothingness, and I yelled helplessly, "Get out of the way!" The bird
doubled itself up like a partly inverted V, flapped, went up to the
right abruptly and vanished from my circle of interest. Then I saw
the shadow of my aeroplane keeping a fixed distance before me and very
steady, and the turf as it seemed streaming out behind it. The turf!--it
wasn't after all streaming so impossibly fast.

When I came gliding down to the safe spread of level green I had chosen,
I was as cool and ready as a city clerk who drops off an omnibus in
motion, and I had learnt much more than soaring. I tilted up her nose
at the right moment, levelled again and grounded like a snowflake on a
windless day. I lay flat for an instant and then knelt up and got on my
feet atremble, but very satisfied with myself. Cothope was running down
the hill to me. ...

But from that day I went into training, and I kept myself in training
for many months. I had delayed my experiments for very nearly six weeks
on various excuses because of my dread of this first flight, because of
the