That dog kennel of a barn gave me much to think about. The wind was dead against us. Our speedometer registered ninety miles an hour--and the wind pushing us 15 back at the rate of forty miles left us fifty miles an hour speed. It seemed like fifty feet to me, until I saw off in the distance ahead the silvery haze that hangs over New York like a mantle of mist. A moment later we made out Long Island Sound, laid out with all its little bays and harbors 20 just like a pattern of white paper fallen on the extreme edge of a Persian carpet. There were a few specks on it, and from them whisps of smoke drifted up, many times smaller than pipe smoke.
Bump! A slight jar. I looked at Francis. He was 25 gazing ahead unconcernedly.
Air pockets. We had dropped twenty feet on two separate occasions within the space of a moment. Great!
The machine was still intact. Good old machine! Nice old craft! . . . I felt like patting it on the nose and stroking 30 its sleek fabric back--that is, if it remained constant. If ever I craved constancy in anything, it was then.
Suddenly I relaxed. A feeling of delightful content surged through me. Approaching New York. Above the haze, out of all the hustle and bustle of the human maelstrom. That look of absolute futility I had seen on the faces in the subway, on the streets, in the early hours of 5 morning--these receded from memory. Life was good, after all. It was a wonderful thing if you viewed it correctly. And this was the way to view it.
Reflections of a bright young man being smeared all over the island were things of the past now, as on the right, 10 as far as we could see, the Bronx stretched away, monotonously, endlessly. I thought how much happier I was up there, looking at the Bronx, than if I were in the Bronx down there, looking up at me.
Straight down I made out a Sound steamer. Hell Gate 15 Bridge, a tiny thing like the toys in shop windows.
But the Bronx got me. I had heard much of the Bronx and once or twice had visited the Zoo. But I never conceived the Bronx as a few bushels of building blocks thrown down on a wide green lawn and tumbled about promiscuously. 20 They were blocks, too, whole city squares, miles and miles of squares.