Flight

Men burning leaves or breaking the ground on little farms in Jersey, on fields beside rutted lanes in Delaware where few travelers come, heard, one cool morning last week, a humming and a drumming in the sky, looked up, saw over their heads a great silver shape that flew south as the birds were flying, as the grey geese, the sleek ducks that leave their marshy beds and beat away with the frost at their backs. The Shenandoah it was, which had on that cool morning left its hangar at Lakehurst to start on the longest flight ever attempted by an airship.

On it went. Cities, under the arrowy path of its going, dropped behind like milestones--Wilmington, Baltimore, Washington; then colored country again, woods and fields, the brave and opulent lands of proud Virginia. All day it flew south through the shining levels of the air, and south still after the sun had gone down and the moonlight poured on its silver sides, dimming the lights that pricked out along the gondolas. At dawn it passed Atlanta, turned west, crossed the Mississippi at Greenville. Cotton lands and wheat lands, sage lands and deltas. As the sun was sinking again, it reached Fort Worth, where it was moored within half a mile of the only plant in the world which produces the helium that fills its belly. So was ended the first lap of the journey. The time was 34 hours. The distance was approximately 1,400 miles.

When it took the air next morning, its arrogant nose was pointed at the Rockies. The morning's flying was serene enough, over Texas to Tucson and Cochise, Ariz.; but in the late afternoon the mountains were reached, over which a wind was whistling jauntily. High in air climbed the dirigible, entering the Dragoon Pass; there was a great peak just as high that loomed out of the dusk, a black and ominous spike such as affrights the keels of lowlier boats, hard on the starboard side. "Left," signaled Commander Landsdowne on the bridge; the rudders turned, the Shenandoah paused, writhed, and came around, her propellers biting the wind. The peril was left behind; so also, for a moment, was the course. Then the little light of a freight train that labored along far below pointed out the way, which lay directly along the route of the Texas Pacific R. R. After midnight, the ship --that haughty ship that almost stubbed its toe on a mountain peak--reached San Diego and the Pacific.