Westward

In Tokyo, they saw a fat Japanese standing in a doorway, staring out into a twilight street where yellow children were playing a curious game. The next day, they were above China.

In China, they saw a long narrow river, twisted like a silver whiplash, across flat lands to the ocean. The next day they were above the mountains, where it was cold.

When they reached India, they slept in a low dirty town: a wind, as hot and sticky as a conjurer's hand, passed slowly in the air. After breakfast, they flew away.

From Basra, Irak, they followed along the River Euphrates and in the early evening flew above the flat country to Aleppo. At Aleppo, they rested long enough to remember seeing a pretty girl, whose name they would never learn, standing in the amazed crowd that watched them fly away.

In the course of Icarus, they went through the air to Athens, the place he never reached. The little hills and the brilliant city grew into the darkness under them. They landed at six in the evening and had a bitter wine with their dinner. They made a journey which many a splendid army has made in two months; by the middle of the spring afternoon they were in Marseilles.

In Marseilles, they paused while their plane was being refuelled before starting for Paris. They flew, over the dreamy provinces of France, toward a last great city. There, in the late afternoon, a huge crowd was waiting for them. Their plane drifted to the field at Le Bourget, a weary metal bird, singing a slow song. The wheels rolled over the ground quickly, then slowly. The wheels stopped, the propeller stopped its slow spinning, and the two men got out of their airplane. Both of them were smiling. "Costes!'' yelled the people in the crowd. "Lebrix . . . Lebrix. . . ." Then they ran and lifted the men on their shoulders and carried them off the field.

It had taken Dieudonne Costes and Joseph Lebrix a little more than six days to complete the Tokyo to Paris (10,370 mi.) lap of the round-the-world flight which they started in October, with a hop across the South Atlantic. They had dallied in the U. S. and crossed the Pacific, which no man has ever spanned by air, in a boat. Their last spurt broke all speed records for the journey.

Parisians were determined to honor their own heroes as they had honored Lindbergh eleven months before. The members of the U. S. legation turned out in full force. Government officials cried and kissed the aviators; the older ones had never expected to see them again. People in Paris stood outside their shops talking, laughing . . . you couldn't walk along the Champs Elysees. The Government decreed a special stamp for Costes and Lebrix.

Costes and Lebrix allowed a barber to remove the short stubble which appeared upon their faces since tonsuring in Tokyo; they learned that the ambassadors of 22 American republics were arranging an international reception for them; they said they would take a short rest and then fly across the Atlantic to New York.

The two victorious aviators had begun their world-circling last autumn with the first non-stop flight across the South Atlantic, an adventure far too little heralded in the U. S. They had made this flight in a shiny, grey Hispano-Suiza motored Breguet plane, which with dauntless devotion they called the Nungesser-Coli, and which had already carried M. Costes from Paris to Siberia, from Paris to Persia, in non-stop flights. The Breguet had continued to perform faithfully in the 35,000-mile jaunt around the world; it carried its commanders through the air at an average speed of about 110 miles an hour.