The quiet land would bear its sleeping farms and flocks and hills. And all the flotsam swirling in the shadows would lose its menace. If it were possible, how gladly he would swim toward the strand of daylight! But, well he knew, he was surrounded; for better or for worse the end would come within this murk of darkness.... Sometimes, indeed, when daybreak came, it seemed like convalescence after illness.

What use to turn his eyes toward the east, home of the sun? Between them lay a gulf of night so deep that he could never clamber up again.

XIII

“The Asuncion mail is making good headway; it should be in at about two. The Patagonia mail, however, seems to be in difficulties and we expect it to be much overdue.”

“Very good, Monsieur Rivière.”

“Quite possibly we won’t make the Europe mail wait for it; as soon as Asuncion’s in, come for instructions, please. Hold yourself in readiness.”

Rivière read again the weather reports from the northern sectors. “Clear sky; full moon; no wind.” The mountains of Brazil were standing stark and clear against the moonlit sky, the tangled tresses of their jet-black forests falling sheer into a silver tracery of sea. Upon those forests the moonbeams played and played in vain, tingeing their blackness with no light. Black, too, as drifting wreckage, the islands flecked the sea. But all the outward air route was flooded by that exhaustless fountain of moonlight.

If Rivière now gave orders for the start, the crew of the Europe mail would enter a stable world, softly illuminated all night long. A land which held no threat for the just balance of light and shade, unruffled by the least caress of those cool winds which, when they freshen, can ruin a whole sky in an hour or two.

Facing this wide radiance, like a prospector eyeing a forbidden gold field, Rivière hesitated. What was happening in the south put Rivière, sole protagonist of night flights, in the wrong. His opponents would make such moral capital out of a disaster in Patagonia that all Rivière’s faith would henceforth be unavailing. Not that his faith wavered; if, through a fissure in his work, a tragedy had entered in, well, the tragedy might prove the fissure—but it proved nothing else. Perhaps, he thought, it would be well to have look-out posts in the west. That must be seen to. “After all,” he said to himself, “my previous arguments hold good as ever and the possibilities of accident are reduced by one, the one tonight has illustrated.” The strong are strengthened by reverses; the trouble is that the true meaning of events scores next to nothing in the match we play with men. Appearances decide our gains or losses and the points are trumpery. And a mere semblance of defeat may hopelessly checkmate us.

He summoned an employee. “Still no radio from Bahia Blanca?”

“No.”

“Ring up the station on the phone.”

Five minutes later he made further inquiries. “Why don’t you pass on the messages?”

“We can’t hear the mail.”

“He’s not sending anything?”

“Can’t say. Too many storms. Even if he was sending we shouldn’t pick it up.”

“Can you get Trelew?”

“We can’t hear Trelew.”

“Telephone.”

“We’ve tried. The line’s broken.”

“How’s the weather your end?”

“Threatening. Very sultry. Lightning in the west and south.”

“Wind?”

“Moderate so far. But in ten minutes the storm will break; the lightning’s coming up fast.”

Silence.

“Hullo, Bahia Blanca! You hear me? Good. Call me again in ten minutes.”

Rivière looked through the telegrams from the southern stations. All alike reported: No message from the plane. Some had ceased by now to answer Buenos Aires and the patch of silent areas was spreading on the map as the cyclone swept upon the little towns and one by one, behind closed doors, each house along the lightless streets grew isolated from the outer world, lonely as a ship on a dark sea.