I am still in a state of amazement at the smooth steadfastness of the motion.  There is nothing on earth to compare with that, unless—­and that I can’t judge—­it is an ice yacht travelling on perfect ice.  The finest motor-car in the world on the best road would be a joggling, quivering thing beside it.

To begin with, we went out to sea before the wind, and the plane would not readily rise.  We went with an undulating movement, leaping with a light splashing pat upon the water, from wave to wave.  Then we came about into the wind and rose, and looking over I saw that there were no longer those periodic flashes of white foam.  I was flying.  And it was as still and steady as dreaming.  I watched the widening distance between our floats and the waves.  It wasn’t by any means a windless day; there was a brisk, fluctuating breeze blowing out of the north over the downs.  It seemed hardly to affect our flight at all.

And as for the giddiness of looking down, one does not feel it at all.  It is difficult to explain why this should be so, but it is so.  I suppose in such matters I am neither exceptionally steady-headed nor is my head exceptionally given to swimming.  I can stand on the edge of cliffs of a thousand feet or so and look down, but I can never bring myself right up to the edge nor crane over to look to the very bottom.  I should want to lie down to do that.  And the other day I was on that Belvedere place at the top of the Rotterdam sky-scraper, a rather high wind was blowing, and one looks down through the chinks between the boards one stands on upon the heads of the people in the streets below; I didn’t like it.  But this morning I looked directly down on a little fleet of fishing boats over which we passed, and on the crowds assembling on the beach, and on the bathers who stared up at us from the breaking surf, with an entirely agreeable exaltation.  And Eastbourne, in the early morning sunshine, had all the brightly detailed littleness of a town viewed from high up on the side of a great mountain.

When Mr. Grahame-White told me we were going to plane down I will confess I tightened my hold on the sides of the car and prepared for something like the down-going sensation of a switchback railway on a larger scale.  Just for a moment there was that familiar feeling of something pressing one’s heart up towards one’s shoulders, and one’s lower jaw up into its socket and of grinding one’s lower teeth against the upper, and then it passed.  The nose of the car and all the machine was slanting downwards, we were gliding quickly down, and yet there was no feeling that one rushed, not even as one rushes in coasting a hill on a bicycle.  It wasn’t a tithe of the thrill of those three descents one gets on the great mountain railway in the White City.  There one gets a disagreeable quiver up one’s backbone from the wheels, and a real sense of falling.