Speaker 1: The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle. The
idea that the extraordinary narrative, which has been called the
Joyce Armstrong Fragment, is an elaborate, practical joke evolved by
some unknown person cursed by a perverted and sinister sense
of humor, has now been abandoned by all who have
examined the matter. The most macab and imaginative of plotters
would hesitate before linking his morbid fantasies with the unquestioned
and tragic facts which reinforce the statement. Though the assertions
contained in it are amazing and even monstrous, it is
nonetheless forcing itself upon the general intelligence that they are true,
and that we must readjust our ideas to the new situation.
This world of ours appears to be separated by a
slight and precarious margin of safety from a most singular
and unexpected danger. I will endeavor in this narrative, which
reproduces the original document, and it is necessarily somewhat fragmentary form,
to lay before the reader the whole of the facts
up to date. Prefacing my statement by saying that there
be any who doubt the narrative of Joyce Armstrong. There
can be no question at all as to the facts
concerning Lieutenant Myrtle r N and mister hay Connor, who
undoubtedly met their end in the manner described. The Joyce
Armstrong fragment was found in the field which is called
Lower Haycock, lying one mile to the westward of the
village of Withiam upon the Kent and Sussex border. It
was on the fifteenth September last that an agricultural laborer,
James Flynn and the employment of Matthew Dodd, farmer of
the Chauntry Farm with him, perceived a briar pipe lying
near the footpath which skirts the hedge in Lower Haycock.
A few paces farther on he picked up a pair
of broken binocular glasses. Finally, among some nettles in the ditch,
he caught sight of a flat cat anvespacked book which
proved to be a notebook with detachable leaves, some of
which had come loose and were fluttering along the base
of the hedge. These he collected, but some, including the first,
were never recovered and leave a deplorable hiatus. In this
all important statement, the notebook was taken by the laborer
to his master, who in turn showed it to doctor J.
H Atherton of Hartfield. This gentleman at once recognized the
need for an expert examination, and the manuscript is forwarded
to the Aero Club in London, where it now lies.
The first two pages of the manuscript are missing. There
is also one torn away at the end of the narrative,
though none of these affect the general coherence of the story.
It is conjectured that the missing opening is concerned with
the record of mister Joyce Armstrong's qualifications as an aeronaut,
which can be gathered from other sources, and are admitted
to be unsurpassed among the air pilots of England. For
many years, he has been looked to upon as among
the most daring and most intellectual of flying men, a
combination which has enabled them to both invent and test
several new devices, including the common gyroscopic attachment, which is
known by his name. The main body of the manuscript
is written neatly in ink, but the last few lines
are in pencil and are so ragged as to be
hardly legible, exactly in fact as they might be expected
to appear if they were scribbled out hurriedly from the
seed of a moving aeroplane. There are, it may be added,
several stains, both on the last page and on the
outside cover, which have been pronounced by the Home Office
experts to be blood, probably human and certainly mammalian. The
fact that something closely resembling the organism of malaria was
discovered in this blood, and that Joyce Armstrong is known
to have suffered from intermittent fever, is a remarkable example
of the new weapons which modern science is placed in
the hands of our detectives. And now a word as
to the personality of the author of this epoch making statement.
Joyce Armstrong, according to the few friends who really knew
something of the man, was a poet and a dreamer,
as well as a mechanic and an inventor. He was
a man of considerable wealth, much of which he had
spent in the pursuit of his aeronautical hobby. He had
four private aeroplanes and his hangars near Devizes, and is
said to have made no fewer than one hundred and
seventy a cents in the course of last year. He
was a retiring man with dark moods in which he
would avoid the society of his fellows. Captain Dangerfield, who
knew him better than anyone, says that there were times
when his eccentricity threatened to develop into something more serious.
His habit of carrying a shotgun with him in his
aeroplane was one manifestation of it. Another was the morbid
effect which the fall of Lieutenant Myrtle had upon his mind. Myrtle,
who was attempting the height record, fell from an altitude
of something over thirty thousand feet horrible to narrate. His
head was entirely obliterated, though his body and limbs preserved
their configuration. At every gathering of airman Joyce Armstrong, according
to Dangerfield, would ask, with an enigmatic smile, and where
pray is Myrtle's head. On another occasion, after dinner at
the mess of the Flying School on Salisbury Plane, he
started a debate as to what will be the most
permanent danger which airman will have to encounter. Having listened
to successive opinions as to air pockets fall, to construction
and over banking, he ended by shrugging his shoulders and
refusing to put forward his own views, though he gave
the impression that they differed from any advanced by his companions.
It is worth remarking that after his own complete disappearance,
it was found that his private affairs were arranged with
a precision, which may show that he had a strong
premonition of disaster. With these essential explanations, I will now
give the narrative exactly as it stands, beginning at page
three of the Blood Soaked note Book. Nevertheless, when I
dined at Reims with Coselli and Gustav Raymond, I found
that neither of them was aware of any particular danger
in the higher layers of the atmosphere. I did not
actually say what was in my thoughts, but I got
so near to it that if they had any corresponding idea,
they could not have failed to express it. But then
they are two empty, vinglorious fellows, with no thought beyond
seeing their silly names in the newspaper. It is interesting
to note that neither of them had ever been much
beyond the twenty thousand foot level. Of course, men have
been higher than this, both in balloons and in the
ascent of mountains. It must be well above that point
that the aeroplane enters the danger zone. Always presuming that
my premonitions are correct. Aeroplaning has been with us now
for more than twenty years, and one might well ask
why should this peril be only revealing itself in our day.
The answer is obvious. In the old days of weak engines,
when one hundred horsepower Gnome or Green was considered ample
for every need, the flights were very restricted. Now that
three hundred horse power is the rule rather than the exception,
visits to the upper layers have become easier and more common.
Some of us can remember how in our youth Garros
made a worldwide reputation by attaining nineteen thousand feet and
it was considered a remarkable achievement to fly over the Alps.
Our standard now has been immeasurably raised, and there are
twenty high flights for one. In former years, many of
them have been undertaken with impunity. The thirty thousand foot
level has been reached time after time with no discomfort
beyond cold and asthma. What does this prove? A visitor
might descend upon this planet a thousand times and never
see a tiger, Yet tigers exist, and if he chanced
to come down into a jungle, he might be devoured.
There are jungles of the upper end, and there are
worse things than tigers which inhabit them. I believe in
time they will map these jungles accurately out. Even at
the present moment I could name two of them. One
of them lies over the Powell Barittz district of France.
Another is just over my head as I write here
in my house in Wiltshire. I rather think there is
a third in the Hamburg Wiesbaden district. It was the
disappearance of the airmen that first set me thinking. Of course,
everyone said that they had fallen into the sea, but
that did not satisfy me at all. First there was
very air in France. His machine was found near Bayonne,
but they never got his body. There was the case
of Baxter, also who vanished, though his engine and some
of the iron fixings were found in a wood in Leicestershire.
In that case, doctor Middleton of Amesbury, who was watching
the flight with a telescope, declares that just before the
clouds obscured the view, he saw the machine, which was
at an enormous height, suddenly rise perpendicularly upwards in a
succession of jerks in a manner that he would have
thought to be impossible. That was the last scene of Baxter.
There was a correspondence in the papers, but it never
led to anything. There were several other similar cases, and
then there was the death of hay Connor. What a
cackle there was about an unsolved mystery of the air
and what columns in the halfpenny papers, And yet how
little was ever done to get to the bottom of
the business. He came down on a tremendous vaulplane from
an unknown height. He never got off his machine and
died in his pilot's seat. Died of what heart disease?
Said the doctors rubbish hey Connor's heart was as sound
as mine is? What did Venables say? Venables was the
only man who was at his side when he died.
He said that he was shivering and looked like a
man who had been badly scared. Died of fright, said Vannah,
but could not imagine what he was frightened about. Only
said one word to Venables, which sounded like monstrous. They
could make nothing of that at the inquest, but I
could make something of it. Monsters. That was the last
word of poor Harry hay Connor. And he did die
of fright, just as Venables thought. And then there was
Myrtle's head. Do you really believe does anybody really believe
that a man's head could be driven clean into his
body by the force of a fall. Well, perhaps it
may be possible, but I, for one have never believed
that it was so with myrtle. And the grease upon
his clothes, all slimy with grease, said somebody at the inquest.
Queer than nobody got thinking after that, I did, But
then I had been thinking for a good long time.
I've made three a cents. How Dangerfield used to chaff
me about my shotgun, but I've never been high enough. Now,
with this new light Paula machine, and it's one hundred
and seventy five rober, I should easily touch the thirty thousand.
Tomorrow I'll have a shot at the record. Maybe I
shall have a shot at something else as well. Of course,
it's dangerous. If a fellow wants to avoid danger, he'd
best keep out of flying all together and subside finally
into flannel slippers in a dressing gown. But I'll visit
the air jungle tomorrow, and if there's anything there, I
shall know it. If I return, I'll find myself a
bit of a celebrity. If I don't, this notebook may
explain what I am trying to do and how I
lost my life in doing it, but I'll drivel about
accidents or mysteries, if you please. I chose my Paul
Verona monoplan for the job. There is nothing like a
monoplan when real work is to be done. Beaumont found
that out in very early days. For one thing, it
doesn't mind damp and the weather looks as if we
should be in the clouds all the time. It's a
body little model and answers my hand like a tender
mouth horse. The engine is a ten cylinder rotary rober
working up to one hundred and seventy five. It is
all the modern improvements, enclosed uselage, high curved landing, skids, brakes,
gyroscopic steadi ears and three speeds, worked by an alteration
of the angle of the planes upon the Venetian blind principle.
I took a shotgun with me and a dozen cartridges
filled with buckshot. You should have seen the face of Perkins,
my old mechanic, when I directed him to put them in.
I was dressed like an Arctic explorer, with two jerseys
under my overalls, thick socks inside, my padded boots, a
storm cap with flaps, and my TALC goggles. It was
stifling outside the hangars, but I was going for the
summit of the Himalayasinet to dress for the part. Perkins
knew there was something on and implored me to take
him with me. Perhaps I should if I were using
the biplane. But a monoplane is a one man show
if you want to get the last foot of life
out of it. Of course, so I took an oxygen bag.
The man who goes for the altitude record without one
will either be frozen or smothered, or both. I had
a good look at the planes, the rudder bar, and
the elevating lever before I got in. Everything was in order,
so far as I could see. Then I switched on
my engine and found that she was running sweetly. When
they let her go, she rose almost at once upon
the lowest speed. I circled my home field once or
twice just to warm her up, and then with a
wave to Perkins and the others, I flattened out my
planes and put her on her highest She skimmed like
a swallow down wind for eight or ten miles, until
I turned her nose up a little and she began
to climb in a great spiral for the cloud bank
above me. It's all important to rise slowly and adapt
yourself to the pressure as you go. It was a close,
warm day for in English September, and there was the
hush and heaviness and pending rain. Now and then there
came sudden puffs of wind from the southwest, one of
them so gusty and unexpected that it caught me napping
and turned me half round for an instant. I remember
the time when gusts and whirls and air pockets used
to be things of danger, before we learned to put
an overmastering power into our engines. Just as I reached
the cloud banks with an altimeter marking three thousand down,
came the rain. My word, how it poured. It drummed
upon my wings and lashed against my face, blurring my
glasses so that I could hardly see. I got down
onto a low speed, for it was painful to travel
against it. As I got higher, it became hail, and
I had to turn tail to it. One of my
cylinders was out of action, a dirty plug, I should imagine.
But still I was rising steadily with plenty of power.
After a bit the trouble passed, whatever it was, and
I heard the full, deep throated purr. The ten singing
is won. That's where the beauty of our modern silencers
come in. We can at last control our engines by ear,
how they squeal and squeak and sob when they are
in trouble. All those cries for help were wasted in
the old days, whenever he sound was swallowed up by
the monstrous racket of the machine. If only the early
aviators could come back and see the beauty and perfection
of the mechanism which have been bought at the cost
of their lives. About nine thirty I was nearing the
clouds down below me, all blurred and shadowed with rain
lay the vast expanse of Salisbury Plain. Half a dozen
flying machines were doing hackwork at the thousand foot level,
looking like little black swallows against the green background. I
dare say they were wondering what I was doing up
in cloud land. Suddenly a gray curtain drew across beneath me,
and wet folds of vapors were swirling round my face.
It was clammily cold and miserable, but I was above
the hail storm, and that was something gained. The cloud
was as dark and thick as a London fog, and
my anxiety to get clear, I cocked her nose up
until the automatic alarm bell rang, and I actually began
to slide backwards. My soft and dripping wings had made
me heavier than I thought, But presently I was in
lighter cloud, and soon had cleared the first layer. There
was a second, opal colored and fleecy, at a great
height above my head, a white unbroken ceiling above, and
a dark unbroken floor below, with the monoplane laboring upwards
upon a vast spiral between them. It is deadly lonely
in these cloud spaces. Once a great flight of some
small water birds went past me, flying very fast to
the westwards. The quick whir of their wings and their
musical cry were cheery to my ear. I fancy that
they were teal, but I am a wretched zoologist. Now
that we humans have become birds, we must really learn
to know our brethren by sight. The wind down beneath
me whirled and swayed the broad cloud plane. Once a
great eddy formed in it a whirlpool of vapor, and
threw it as down a funnel. I caught sight of
the distant world. A large white bike plane was passing
it a vast depth beneath me. I fancy it was
the morning mail service betwixt Bristol and London. Then the
drift swirled inwards again, and the great solitude was unbroken.
Just after ten I touched the lower edge of the
upper cloud stratum. It consisted of fine diaphanous vapor drifting
swiftly from the westwards. The wind had been steadily rising
all this time, and it was now blowing a sharp
breeze twenty eight an hour by my gauge. Already it
was very cold, though my altimeter only marked nine thousand.
The engines were working beautifully, and we went droning steadily upwards.
The cloud bank was thicker than I had expected, but
at last it thinned out into a golden mist before me,
And then in an instant I had shot out from it,
and there was an unclouded sky and a brilliant sun
above my head, all blue and gold above, all shining
silver below. One vast, glimmering plane. As far as my
eyes could reach. It was a quarter past ten o'clock,
and the barograph needle pointed to twelve thousand, eight hundred.
Up I went, and up, my ears concentrated upon the
deep purring of my motor, my eyes busy always with
the watch, the revolution indicator, the petrol level, and the
oil pump. No wonder. Aviators are said to be a
fearless race. With so many things to think of, there
is no time to trouble about oneself. About this time
I noted how unreliable is the compass went above a
certain height from earth. At fifteen thousand feet, mine was
pointing east and a point south. The sun and the
wind gave me my true bearings. I had hoped to
reach an eternal stillness in these high altitudes, But with
every thousand feet of ascent, the gale grew stronger. My
machine groaned and trembled in every joint and rivet as
she faced it, and swept away like a sheet of paper.
When I banked her on the turn, skimming down wind
at a greater pace, perhaps than ever mortal man man
has moved. Yet I had always to turn again and
tack up in the wind's eye. For it was not
merely a height record that I was after by all
my calculations. It was above little Wilchair that my air
jungle lay, and all my labors might be lost if
I struck the outer layers at some farther point. When
I reached the nineteen thousand foot level, which was about midday,
the wind was so severe that I looked with some
anxiety to the stays of my wings, expecting momentarily to see
them snap or slacken. I even cast loose the parachute
behind me, and fastened its hook onto the ring of
my leathern belt, so as to be ready for the worst.
Now was the time when a bit of scamped work
by the mechanic is paid for by the life of
the aeronaut. But she held together bravely. Every cordon strut
was humming and vibrating, like so many harp strings. But
it was glorious to see how for all the beating
and the buffeting, she was still the conqueror of nature
and the mist of the sky. There is surely something
divine in man himself that he should rise so superior
to the limitations which creation seemed to impose rise too.
By such unselfish, heroic devotion as this air conquest is shown,
talk of human degeneration. When has such a story as
this been written in the annals of our race? These
were the thoughts in my head as I climbed that
monstrous inclined plane, with the wind sometimes beating in my
face and sometimes whistling behind my ears, while the cloud
land beneath me fell away to such a distance that
the folds and hummocks of silver had all smoothed out
into one flat, shining plane. But suddenly I had a
horrible and unprecedented experience. I have known before what it
is to be, and what our neighbors have called outurbillon,
but never on such a scale as this. That huge
sweeping river of wind which I have spoken had as
it appear, Here's whirlpools within it, which were as monstrous
as itself. Without a moment's warning, I was dragged suddenly
into the heart of one. I spun round for a
minute or two with such velocity that I almost lost
my senses, and then fell suddenly left wing foremost down
the vacuum funnel in the center. I dropped like a
stone and lost nearly one thousand feet. It was only
my belt that kept me in my seat, and the
shock and breathlessness left me hanging half insensible over the
side of the fuselage. But I am always capable of
a supreme effort. It is my one great merit as
an aviator. I was conscious that the descent was slower,
the whirlpool was a cone rather than a funnel, and
I had come to the apex with a terrific wrench,
throwing my weight all to one side. I leveled my
planes and brought her head away from the wind. In
an instant I had shot out of the eddies and
was skimming down the sky. Then, shaken victors glorious, I
turned her nose up and began once more my steady
grind on the upward spiral. I took a large sweep
to avoid the danger spot of the whirlpool, and soon
I was safely above it. Just after one o'clock I
was twenty one thousand feet above the sea level. To
my great joy, I had topped the gale, and with
every hundred feet of ascent the air grew stiller. On
the other hand, it was very cold, and I was
conscious of that peculiar nausea which goes with the rarefication
of the air. For the first time, I unscrewed the
mouth of my oxygen bag and took an occasional whiff
of the glorious gas. I could feel it running like
a cordial through my veins, and I was exhilarated, almost
to the point of drunkenness. I shouted and sang as
I soared upwards into the cold, still outer world. It
is very clear to me that the insensibility which came
upon Glacier, and in a lesser degree upon Cockswell, when
in eighteen sixty two they ascended in a balloon to
the height of thirty thousand feet, was due to the
extreme speed with which a perpendicular ascent is made, doing
it in an easy gradient, and accustoming oneself to the
lessened barometric pressure by slow degrees, there are no such
dreadful symptoms at the same great height. I found that,
even without my oxygen inhaler, I could breathe without undue distress.
It was bitterly cold, however, and my thermometer was at
zero fahrenheit. At one thirty I was nearly seven miles
above the surface of the Earth, and still ascending steadily.
I found, however, that the rarefied air was giving markedly
less support to my planes, and that my angle of
ascent had to be considerably lowered. In consequence. It was
already clear that even with my light weight and strong
engine power, there was a point in front of me
where I should be held. To make matters worse, one
of my sparking plugs was in trouble again, and there
was an intermittent misfiring in the engine. My heart was
heavy with the fear of failure. It was about that
time that I had a most extraordinary experience. Something whiz
past me in a trail of smoke and exploded with
loud hissings sound, sending forth a cloud of steam. For
the instant I could not imagine what had happened. Then
I remembered that the Earth is forever being bombarded by
meteor stones, and would be hardly inhabitable were they not
in nearly every case turned a vapor in the outer
layers of the atmosphere. Here is a new danger for
the high altitude man. For two others passed me when
I was nearing the forty thousand foot mark. I cannot
doubt that at the edge of Earth's envelope, the risk
would be a very real one. My barograph needle marked
forty one thousand, three hundred when I became aware that
I could go no farther. Physically, the strain was not
as yet greater than I could bear, but my machine
had reached its limit. The attenuated air gave no firm
support to the wings, and the least tilt developed into
a side slip, while she seemed sluggish on her controls,
possibly hid the engine been at its best, another thousand
feet might have been within our capacity, but it was
still misfiring, and two out of the ten cylinders appeared
to be out of action. If I had not already
reached the zone for which I was searching, then I
should never see it upon this journey. But was it
not possible that I had attained it? Soaring in circles
like a monstrous hawk. Upon the forty thousand foot level,
I let the monoplane guide herself, and with my Manheim glass,
I made a careful observation by surroundings. The heavens were
perfectly clear. There was no indication of those dangers which
I had imagined. I have said that I was soaring
in circles. It struck me suddenly that I would do
well to take a wider sweep and open up a
new air tract. If the hunter entered an earth jungle,
he would drive through it if he wished to find
his game. My reasoning had led me to believe that
the air jungle which I had imagined lay somewhere over Wiltchhiir.
This should be to the south and west of me.
My bearings from the sun, for the compass was hopeless,
and no trace of Earth was to be seen, nothing
but the distant silver cloud plane. However, I got my
direction as best I might, and kept her head straight
to the mark. I reckoned that my petrol supply would
not last for more than another hour or so, but
I could afford to use it to the last drop,
since a single magnificent vulplane could at any time take
me to the Earth. Suddenly I was aware of something new.
The air in front of me had lost its crystal clearness.
It was full of long, ragged wisps of something which
I could only compare to very fine cigarette smoke. It
hung about in wreaths and coils, turning and twisting slowly
in the sunlight. As the monoplane shot through it. I
was aware of a faint taste of oil upon my lips,
and there was a greasy scum upon the woodwork of
the machine. Some infinitely fine organic matter appeared to be
suspended in the atmosphere. There was no life there. It
was inchoate and diffuse, extending for many square acres and
then fringing off into the void. No, it was not life.
But might it not be the remains of life? Above all?
Might it not be the food of life, of monstrous life,
even as the humble grease of the ocean is the
food for the mighty whale. The thought was in my
mind when my eyes looked upwards and I saw the
most wonderful vision that ever man has seen. Can I
hope to convey it to you, even as I saw
it myself last Thursday? Conceive a jellyfish, such as sails
in our summer, seas, bell shaped and of enormous size,
far larger, I should judge than the dome of Saint Paul's.
It was of a light pink color, vein with a
delicate green, but the whole huge fabric so tenuous that
it was but a fairy outline against the dark blue sky.
It pulsated with a delicate and regular rhythm. From it,
there depended too long own drooping green tentacles, which swayed
slowly backwards and forwards. This gorgeous vision passed gently, with
noiseless dignity, over my head, as light and fragile as
a soap bubble, and drifted upon its stately way. I'd
have turned my monoplane that I might look after this
beautiful creature, when in a moment I found myself amidst
a perfect fleet of them, of all sizes, but none
so large as the first. Some were quite small, but
the majority about as big as an average balloon, and
with much the same curvature at the top. There was
in them a delicacy of texture and coloring which reminded
me of the finest Venetian glass. Pale shades of pink
and green were the prevailing tints, but all had a
lovely iridescence where the sun shimmered through their dainty forms.
Some hundreds of them drifted past me, a wonderful fairy
squadron of strange, unknown argacies of the sky, creatures whose
forms and substance were so attuned to these pure heights
that one could not conceive anything so delicate within actual
sight or sound of Earth. But soon my attention was
drawn to a new phenomenon, the serpents of the outer air.
These were long, thin, fantastic coils of vapor like material
which turned and twisted with great speed, flying round and
round at such a pace that the eyes could hardly
follow them. Some of these ghosts like creatures were twenty
or thirty feet long, but it was difficult to tell
their girth, for their outline was so hazy that it
seemed to fade away into the air around them. These
air snakes were very like gray or smoke color, with
some darker lines within, which gave the impression of a
definite organism. One of them was past my very face,
and I was conscious of a cold clammy contact, But
the composition was so unsubstantial that I could not connect
them with any thought of physical danger any more than
the beautiful bell like creatures which had preceded them. There
was no more solidity in their frames than in the
floating spume from a broken wave. But a more terrible
experience was in store for me. Floating downwards from a
great height there came a purplish patch of vapor, small
as I saw at first, but rapidly enlarging as it
approached me, until it appeared to be hundreds of square
feet in size. Though fashioned in some transparent jelly like substance,
it was nonetheless of much more definite outline and solid
consistence than anything which I had seen before. There were
more traces, too, of a physical organization, especially two vast,
shadowy circular plates upon either side, which may have been eyesed,
and a perfectly solid white projection between them, which was
as curved and cruel as the beak of a vulture.
The whole aspect of this monster was formidable and threatening,
and it kept changing its color from a very light
mauve to a dark, angry purple, so thick that it
cast a shadow as it drifted between my monoplane and
the sun. On the upper curve of its huge body,
there were three great projections which I can only describe
as enormous bubbles, and I was convinced as I looked
at them, that they were charged with some extremely light
gas which served to buoy up the misshapen and semi
solid mass in the rarefied air. The creature moved swiftly along,
keeping pace easily with the monoplane, and for twenty miles
or more it formed my horrible escort, hovering over me
like a bird of prey which is waiting to pounce.
Its method of progression, done so swiftly that it was
not easy to follow, was to throw out a long,
glutenous streamer in front of it, which in turn seemed
to draw forward the rest of the writhing body. So
elastica gelatinous was it that never for two successive minutes
was it the same shape, and yet each change made
it more threatening and loathsome than the last. I knew
that it meant mischief. Every purple flush of its hideous
body told me so. The vague, goggling eyes which were
turned always upon me, were cold and merciless in their
viscid hatred. I dipped the nose of my monoplane downwards
to escape it. As I did so, as quick as
a flash, there was shot out a long tentacle from
this massive floating blubber, and it felt as light and
sinuous as a whiplash across the front of my machine.
There was a loud hiss as it lay for a
moment across the hot engine, and it whisked itself into
the air again, while the huge flat body drew itself
together as if in sudden pain. I dipped to a vulpeak,
but again a tentacle fell over the monoplane, and it
was shorn off by the propeller as easily as it
might have cut through a smoke wreath. A long, gliding, sticky,
serpent like coil came from behind and caught me round
the waist, dragging me out of the fuselage. I tore
at it, my fingers sinking into the smooth, glue like surface.
For an instant. I disengaged myself, but only to be
caught round the boot by another coil, which gave me
a jerk that tilted me almost onto my back. As
eye fell over, I blazed off both barrels of my gun,
though indeed it was like attacking an elephant with a
pea shooter to imagine that any human weapon could cripple
that mighty bulk. And yet I aimed better than I knew,
for with a loud report, one of the great blisters
upon the creature's back exploded with the puncture of the buckshot.
It was very clear that my conjecture was right, that
these vast clear bladders were distended with some lifting gas.
For in an instant the huge cloud like body turned sideways,
writhing desperately to find its balance, while the white beak
snapped and gaped in horrible fury. Al Ready I had
shot away on the steepest glide that I dared to attempt,
my engine still full on the flying propeller, and the
force of gravity shooting me downwards like an aerowlight. Behind me,
I saw a dull, purplish smudge growing swiftly smaller and
merging into the blue sky behind it. I was safe
out of the deadly jungle of the outer air. Once
out of danger, I throttled my engine. For nothing tears
a machine to pieces quicker than running on full power
from a height. It was a glorious spiral vault plane
from nearly eight miles of altitude, first to the level
of the silver cloud bank, then to that of the
storm cloud beneath it, and finally, in beating rain to
the surface of the Earth. I saw the Bristol channel
beneath me. As I broke from the clouds but having
still some petrel in my tank, I got twenty miles
inland before I found myself stranded in a field half
a mile from the village of Ashcombe. There I got
three tins of petrol from a passing motor car, and
at ten minutes past six that evening, I alighted gently
in my own home meadow at Divisas, after such a
journey as no mortal upon Earth has ever yet taken
a live to tell the tale. I have seen the beauty,
and I have seen the horror of the heights, and
greater beauty, or greater horror than that is not within
the ken of man. And now it is my plan
to go once again before I give my results to
the world. My reason for this is that I must
surely have something to show by way of proof, before
I lay such a tale before my fellow men. It
is true that others will soon follow and will confirm
what I have said, And yet I should wish to
carry conviction from the first. Those lovely iridescent bubbles of
the air should not be hard to capture. They drift
slowly upon their way, and the swift monoplane could intercept
their leisurely course it is likely enough that they would
dissolve in the heavier layers of the atmosphere, and that
some small heap of amorphous jelly might be all that
I should bring to Earth with me. And yet something
there would surely be by which I could substantiate my story. Yes,
I will go, even if I run a risk by
doing so. These purple horrors would not seem to be numerous.
It is probable that I shall not see one. If
I do, I shall dive at once. At the worst,
there is always the shotgun, and my knowledge of here.
A page of the manuscript is unfortunately missing. On the
next page is written in large straggling writing, forty three
thousand feet I shall never see Earth again. There beneath
me three of them, God help me. It is a
dreadful death to die. Such in its entirety is the
Joyce Armstrong statement of the man Nothing has since been seen.
Pieces of a shattered monoplane have been picked up in
the preserves of mister bud Lushington, upon the borders of
Kent and Sussex, within a few miles of the spot
where the notebook was discovered. The unfortunate aviator's theory is
correct that this air jungle, as he called it, existed
only over the southwest of England. Then it would seem
that he had fled from it at the full speed
of his monoplane, but had been overtaken and devoured by
these horrible creatures at some spot in the outer atmosphere
above the place where the groom relics were found. The
picture of that monoplane skimming down the sky, with the
nameless terrors flying as swiftly beneath it, and cutting it
off always from the earth, while they gradually closed in
upon their victim, is one upon which a man who
valued his sanity would prefer not to dwell. There are many,
as I am aware, who still jeer at the facts
which I have here set down. But even they must
admit that Joyce Armstrong has disappeared, and I would commend
to them his own words. This notebook may explain what
I am trying to do, and how I lost my
life in doing it, But no drivel about accidents or mysteries,
if you please, And of the horror of the heights