AIR TRAVEL AND ITS WONDERS

Manawatu Times, Volume 61, Issue 194, 18 August 1936, Page 10

AIR TRAVEL AND ITS WONDERS

Vivid Impressions of Flights

A N aeroplane in the shy has long since< become an object of casual interest, even to children and natives of distant lands; yet air travel itself has not become so common that passengers can help remarking the wonders given by height to familiar scenes beneath them, says an English paper.' Every day someone is making his first flight. Imperial Airways, Ltd., have received from passengers many vivid impressions of “bird’s eye” views all over their system. It is natural, perhaps, that many of the similes should be drawn from toys and insects, since the first sharp contrast to the traveller by air is one of sizes. Motor-cars on the roads below beeomo like tiny beetles crawling along strips of white tape; ships in the Channel are toy boats on a pond; native villages with their huts might be groups of beehives; and giraffes and other animals seem so small, yet so clearly defined, that they are immediately reminiscent of the painted toy animals of childhood days. To one passenger the shores of England and France looked so close that the gap might easily be spanned by a monster bridge. Many travellers have been impressed by the vast difference in the landscapes of England and France. The winding roads (twisting streams and irregular shapes of the fields of England weave themselves into a “crazy-quilt” pattern, whereas the landscape of France, with straight roads and large fields, might have been measured out with a ruler and compass. If England looks like a mossy jigsaw puzzle, wrote one passenger, France might be a green Wilton carpet, worn a little threadbear. To the same writer the Channel was a “vast field of iridescent pebbled leather, a swarm with shipping that looked like

yvnterbugs” and cattle in the meadows were “groups of lice, domesticated and become respectable.” Cloud-shapes provide fantastic material for these pen pictures. Some assume the semblance of giant mushrooms. Others have the appearance of “a thousand tents in a military encampment.” There are clouds like horseshoes, others like snowladen trees, and “soon the world, is entirely hidden, ail'd streamers of vapour glide past like ghosts.” Away on the Empire routes impressions crowd upon the mind. Can the African mountain, Kilimanjaro, ever havo looked to travellers by land like “an enormous Christmas pudding covered with white icing?” Rico fields at Bangkok appeared to bo billiards tables side by side and the Irrawaddy river at Rangoon twisted on its own track like a double cracker.

Watching wild life from the air has an interest of its own during the journey across Africa. Sometimes, inaddition to elephants and other big game, lions are seen, and once, when a machine flow low a large group of them, young and old, raised their heads and snarled angrily. Across scenes of classical antiquity, across Africa and India, travellers are looking down and seeing the world through different eyes—a pageant of nature. Roaring through space; watching the sun rise like a flame in the desert; landing on the edge of primeval forests; over the ancient Nile —breakfast in Egypt, lunch in Greece, dinner in Italy. Talk about magic carpets!”

Tho French writer and moralist Chamfort thus defined a beautiful ■woman: “She is paradise for tho eyes, hell for the soul and purgatory for the purse.” “Neues Wiener Journal,” Vienna.