His exhilaration increased rapidly, became a sort of intoxication.  He found himself drawing deep breaths of air, laughing aloud, desiring to shout.  After a time that desire became too strong for him, and he shouted.  They curved about towards the south.  They drove with a slight list to leeward, and with a slow alternation of movement, first a short, sharp ascent and then a long downward glide that was very swift and pleasing.  During these downward glides the propeller was inactive altogether.  These ascents gave Graham a glorious sense of successful effort; the descents through the rarefied air were beyond all experience.  He wanted never to leave the upper air again.

For a time he was intent upon the landscape that ran swiftly northward beneath him.  Its minute, clear detail pleased him exceedingly.  He was impressed by the ruin of the houses that had once dotted the country, by the vast treeless expanse of country from which all farms and villages had gone, save for crumbling ruins.  He had known the thing was so, but seeing it so was an altogether different matter.  He tried to make out familiar places within the hollow basin of the world below, but at first he could distinguish no data now that the Thames valley was left behind.  Soon, however, they were driving over a sharp chalk hill that he recognised as the Guildford Hog’s Back, because of the familiar outline of the gorge at its eastward end, and because of the ruins of the town that rose steeply on either lip of this gorge.  And from that he made out other points, Leith Hill, the sandy wastes of Aldershot, and so forth.  Save where the broad Eadhamite Portsmouth Road, thickly dotted with rushing shapes, followed the course of the old railway, the gorge of the wey was choked with thickets.

The whole expanse of the Downs escarpment, so far as the grey haze permitted him to see, was set with wind-wheels to which the largest of the city was but a younger brother.  They stirred with a stately motion before the south-west wind.  And here and there were patches dotted with the sheep of the British Food Trust, and here and there a mounted shepherd made a spot of black.  Then rushing under the stern of the monoplane came the Wealden Heights, the line of Hindhead, Pitch Hill, and Leith Hill, with a second row of wind-wheels that seemed striving to rob the downland whirlers of their share of breeze.  The purple heather was speckled with yellow gorse, and on the further side a drove of black oxen stampeded before a couple of mounted men.  Swiftly these swept behind, and dwindled and lost colour, and became scarce moving specks that were swallowed up in haze.