THE CRUISE OF THE CONDOR

by W. E. Johns

XVII. CRASHED (Pages 237 – 246)

“Forest – forest – forest. On all sides, reaching to the horizon, stretched the eternal forest. Would it never end?” After three hours they see clouds and Biggles climbs up to fifteen thousand feet. Still climbing “at eighteen thousand feet he passed the first gigantic sentinel, towering like a cold, grim fortress in some fantastic fairy-tale”. (At eighteen thousand feet he passed the first gigantic sentinel - is the frontispiece illustration taken from a line on page 239). Ahead is just a sea of mist. The engine splutters and fades out as the main tank runs dry. They now have just perhaps half an hours’ worth of fuel in the gravity tank. Twenty minutes pass and then thirty feet to the right, Biggles sees another aeroplane. “Had it been a whale or an elephant soaring through the air it could not have been more completely paralysing in its effect on him”. The other pilot beckons at him, but it is too late, the engine of the Condor cuts out dead and they go down into the swirling mist, dreading hitting mountains. The altimeter drops to seven thousand feet and still they go down. “Where was the ground? Was it only fifty feet below or was it still five thousand feet below?” Suddenly, the mist clears and the ground can be seen some two hundred feet below. “In one place only was the ground anything like level, but even that was broken by tangled patches of shrub and loose boulders. He side-slipped towards it, for it represented their best chance – not to save the machine, for that was out of the question, but their lives. In that critical moment the pilot’s skill and nerve did not desert him”. They crash land. All on board are uninjured but the aircraft is significantly damaged. “It isn’t so bad as one might expect” says Biggles examining it afterwards. Smyth thinks “She’ll never fly out of this place, of course, even if we were able to repair her, but I should say that if we were in a civilised country it would be possible to get her repaired”. Biggles tells the others he saw another aircraft. It was a three-engined Junkers. Algy feels sure the pilot will come and look for them.