In a sense, it was an undramatic start, and pleased the excitable Frenchmen but little. Their tastes would have dictated a flourish of trumpets or a salute of twenty-one guns; whereas, in fact, there was no music whatever at this particular moment, and the solitary gun which denoted the start boomed heavily and almost with menace. Its echoes had hardly died away in the heights above Vermala when the roar of Benny’s engine was to be heard, and immediately upon that the machine, flashing silver in the sunshine, soared above the plateau, and was gone in an instant straight across the mighty chasm of the Rhone Valley. Five minutes later the same machine was but a speck against the azure of the sky.
Benny had made a good ascent, and was pleased enough with the way his engine ran. The exhaust was firm and regular; he knew the firing to be even; while, as for the lifting power, he was off the ground in twenty yards and had mounted five hundred feet the very first time he circled above the spectators. This gave him confidence, and sent him straight across the valley without further preliminary. To be sure, he cast down one quick glance at the black ring of spectators upon the plateau before the Palace Hotel, searched out for an instant Lily’s chalet and tried to believe that the figure in the garden was that of a woman who had inspired him to this day’s work; but his reward was a vague impression of a blurred scene, and it gave place almost immediately to the wonder and ecstasy of the flight itself, and to that desire of a goal which burned him as a fever.
His course lay almost directly to the southwest. Upon his left hand were the tremendous precipices of the Janus-faced Weisshorn, the gentler arrête of the Rothhorn, and, behind that again, the black rocks of the Matterhorn. More directly before him were the Becs de Bossons, and the black defile of the lower Valley; while the Aiguilles Rouges, clear and sharp, stood to his right at the moment of departure. Heading for a while down the Valley of the Rhone, he saw the range of the Pennine Alps opening away to the south to disclose Mont Blanc and the triple domes, now lightly veiled by cloud, but plainly to be discerned at the altitude he had chosen. Here Nature seemed a little kinder, showing him low, rounded mountains upon either side of the valley and great woods of the pines which were but black scars upon the sheer rock. Deeper down lay the heart of the chasm, the towns, which were but so many dots upon a sepia ground, the silver thread of the Rhone itself, and Sion with its puny heights whereon proud bishops had built their palaces. Over these he passed at a tremendous speed, watched from below by thousands who were invisible to him. He felt already that he was the master even of this majesty—that man had conquered, and to him henceforth must be the dominion.