Free Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

all dreams, but doomed.

XVII
    One of the wireless operators at the Commodoro Rivadavia station in Patagonia made a startled gesture and all the others keeping helpless vigil there crowded round to read the message.
    A harsh light fell upon the blank sheet of paper over which they bent. The operator’s hand seemed loath to do its task and his pencil shook. The words to write were prisoned in his hand, but already his fingers twitched.
    â€œStorms?”
    He nodded assent; he could hardly hear for interferences. Then he scrawled some illegible signs, then words; then, at last, the text came out.
    â€œCut off at 12,000 feet, above the storm. Proceeding due west toward interior; found we had been carried above sea. No visibility below. Impossible know if still flying over sea. Report if storm extends interior.”
    By reason of the storms the telegram had to be relayed from post to post to Buenos Aires, bearing its message through the night like balefires lit from tower to tower.
    Buenos Aires transmitted a reply. “Storm covers all interior area. How much gasoline left?”
    â€œFor thirty minutes.” These words sped back from post to post to Buenos Aires.
    In under half an hour the plane was doomed to plunge into a cyclone which would crash it to the earth.

XVIII
    Rivière was musing, all hope lost; somewhere this plane would founder in the darkness. A picture rose in his mind of a scene which had impressed him in his boyhood; a pond that was being emptied to find a body. Thus, till this flood of darkness had been drained off the earth and daylight turned toward the plains and cornfields, nothing would be found. Then some humble peasants perhaps would come on two young bodies, their elbows folded on their faces, like children asleep amid the grass and gold of some calm scene. Drowned by the night.
    Rivière thought of all the treasure buried in the depths of night, as in deep, legendary seas. Night’s
apple trees that wait upon the dawn with all their flowers that serve as yet no purpose. Night, perfume-laden, that hides the lambs asleep and flowers that have no color yet.
    Little by little the lush tilth, wet woods, and dew-cool meadows, would swing toward the light. But somewhere in the hills, no longer dark with menace, amid the fields and flocks, a world at peace again, two children would seem to sleep. And something would have flowed out of the seen world into that other.
    Rivière knew all the tenderness of Fabien’s wife, the fears that haunted her; this love seemed only lent her for a while, like a toy to some poor child. He thought of Fabien’s hand which, firm on the controls, would hold the balance of his fate some minutes yet; that hand had given caresses and lingered on a breast, wakening a tumult there; a hand of godlike virtue, it had touched a face, transfiguring it. A hand that brought miracles to pass.
    Fabien was drifting now in the vast splendor of a sea of clouds, but under him there lay eternity. Among the constellations still he had his being, their only denizen. For yet a while he held the universe in his hand, weighed it at his breast. That wheel he clutched upbore a load of human treasure and desperately, from one star to the other, he trafficked this useless wealth, soon to be his no more.
    A single radio post still heard him. The only link between him and the world was a wave of music, a minor modulation. Not a lament, no cry, yet purest of sounds that ever spoke despair.

XIX
    Robineau broke in upon his thoughts.
    â€œI’ve been thinking, sir.... Perhaps we might try—”
    He had nothing really to suggest but thus proclaimed his good intentions. A solution, how he would have rejoiced to find it! He went about it as if it were a puzzle to be solved. Solutions were his
forte,
but Rivière would not hear of them. “I tell you, Robineau, in life there are no solutions. There are only motive forces, and our task is to set them acting—then