Page:The Fun of It.pdf/95

Rh before; and behind, the mass of soggy cloud we came through, is pink with dawn. Dawn ‘the rosy fingered’, as the Odyssey has it.

“Himmel! The sea! We are 3000. Patchy clouds. We have been jazzing from 1000 to 5000 where we now are, to get out of clouds. At present there are sights of blue and sunshine, but everlast­ing clouds always in the offing.”

In the northern latitude in which we flew, the late June days were remarkably long. It was actually light until ten o’clock at night and dawn or its approximation appeared before three in the morning. In the hours between, there was little complete darkness unless we were blanketed with fog. Otherwise as the sun moved around the world, we thought we could see a pale glow marking its course, far to our left.

Log book: “5000 ft. A mountain of cloud. The North Star on our wing tip. My watch says 3:15. I can see dawn to the left.”

The highest the Friendship climbed was 11,000 feet to get over a bank of clouds which reared their heads like dragons in the morning sun. The lowest we flew was a few hundred feet along the coast of Wales. Some of the clouds over the Atlantic held rain, and every time the plane plowed through them the outboard motor would cough and com­plain. They did not like being wet because they had been caked with salt water on the take-off and the salt had dried to make a contact for the sparks to jump from the plugs.