“I was Challoner’s passenger when he was killed at Sheerness.  That was a queer unexpected experience, you may have supposed it an agony of terror, but indeed there was no fear in it at all.  At any rate, I do not remember a moment of fear; it has gone clean out of my memory if ever it was there.  We were swimming high and fast, three thousand feet or so, in a clear, sweet air over the town of Sheerness.  The river, with a string of battleships, was far away to the west of us, and the endless grey-blue flats of the Thames to the north.  The sun was low behind a bank of cloud.  I was watching a motor-car, which seemed to be crawling slowly enough, though, no doubt, it was making a respectable pace, between two hedges down below.  It is extraordinary how slowly everything seems to be going when one sees it from such an height.

“Then the left wing of the monoplane came up like a door that slams, some wires whistled past my head, and one whipped off my helmet, and then, with the seat slipping away from me, down we went.  I snatched unavailingly for the helmet, and then gripped the sides.  It was like dropping in a boat suddenly into the trough of a wave—­and going on dropping.  We were both strapped, and I got my feet against the side and clung to the locked second wheel.

“The sensation was as though something like an intermittent electric current was pouring through me.  It’s a ridiculous image to use, I can’t justify it, but it was as if I was having cold blue light squirted through every pore of my being.  There was an astonishment, a feeling of confirmation.  ’Of course these things do happen sometimes,’ I told myself.  I don’t remember that Challoner looked round or said anything at all.  I am not sure that I looked at him. . . .

“There seemed to be a long interval of intensely excited curiosity, and I remember thinking, ’Lord, but we shall come a smash in a minute!’ Far ahead I saw the grey sheds of Eastchurch and people strolling about apparently unaware of our disaster.  There was a sudden silence as Challoner stopped the engine. . . .

“But the point I want to insist upon is that I did not feel afraid.  I was simply enormously, terribly interested. . . .

“There came a tremendous jolt and a lunge, and we were both tipped forward, so that we were hanging forehead down by our straps, and it looked as if the sheds were in the sky, then I saw nothing but sky, then came another vast swerve, and we were falling sideways, sideways. . . .

“I was altogether out of breath and physically astonished, and I remember noting quite intelligently as we hit the ground how the green grass had an effect of pouring out in every direction from below us. . . .

“Then I remember a jerk and a feeling that I was flying up again.  I was astonished by a tremendous popping—­fabric, wires, everything seemed going pop, pop, pop, like a machine-gun, and then came a flash of intense pain as my arm crumpled up.  It was quite impersonal pain.  As impersonal as seeing intense colour.  Splinters!  I remember the word came into my head instantly.  I remember that very definitely.