Biggles and Cruise of the Condor

by W E Johns

  * This manoeuvre consists of a half roll off the top of a loop thereby quickly reversing the direction of flight. It was named after Max Immelmann, successful German fighter pilot 1914-1916.

  Up, up, roared the Condor in an almost vertical zoom, and then, reversing its direction, screamed down on the tail of the Curtiss. He became the pursuer and the other pilot the pursued. His next move was rendered easier by the fact that the other pilot, evidently unaccustomed to combat tactics, appeared to have lost sight of him, for he continued to fly straight on, looking quickly to right and left. Finally he looked up over his shoulder and started to turn, but he was too late. The Condor, travelling at nearly twice the speed of the other by reason of its dive, swept over the Curtiss, its wheels almost scraping the top plane as it passed. No one but a War pilot would have dared to take such a risk.

  As they passed, Algy raised himself up on his seat, the oil drum between his uplifted hands. Then he hurled it down with all his strength. Biggles zoomed.

  The drum caught the Curtiss fair and square on the centre section, and the effect was instantaneous. The machine lurched sickeningly, and its top wings folded back like those of a butterfly about to alight. Then it plunged earthward, twisting and turning like a piece of crumpled tissue paper.

  Algy, white faced, leaning over the side, saw a wing tear off and float slowly downwards far behind the plunging hull. He shook his head slowly, as if appalled at the deed now it was done, but Biggles was watching him with an expressionless face, his lips compressed into a thin, straight line. Bending over, he shouted, 'Don't worry; they asked for it; now they've got it.' And then, turning back to his compass, pointed the nose of the Condor slightly south of west. A few moments later, impelled by some mutual impulse, they looked back. From earth to sky stretched a great blanket of black smoke that hid from human eyes the last stronghold of a mighty empire and the treasure of its murdered king.

  Chapter 17

  Crashed

  Forest-forest-forest. On all sides, reaching to the horizon, stretched the eternal forest. Would it never end? For three long hours they had been flying on their plotted course towards Bolivia, homeward bound. Biggles had sunk low in his cockpit, utterly weary of the endless forest that was as monotonous as the open sea. Once or twice he roused himself slightly and looked below as they passed over a river that wound its mysterious way through the innermost recesses of the jungle, but no sign of life or habitation could he see. The immensity of it appalled him, depressed him beyond measure, possibly because he was by no means certain, having only a very small scale map for reference, when they might expect a change of scenery.

  The first indication came in the shape of a small wisp of cloud that appeared above the horizon in front; it raced towards them, embraced them for a moment in its clammy grip, and then swept away astern. Two more appeared, and then a long row of them, advancing in line like the van of a victorious army. Then came a long, unbroken belt of cloud.

  Biggles frowned and started climbing, not quite certain as to whether it would be safer to fly above the cloud or below it, but, remembering the stupendous mountain peaks that lay ahead, he decided it would be better to get above. Eight thousand, ten thousand, and then twelve thousand feet ticked up on the altimeter, and still the ponderous masses of cumulus swept down threateningly upon them. Fourteen thousand-fifteen thousand-the Condor was climbing more slowly now- read the figure under the altimeter* needle. They were clear above the clouds now, flying over a white world of gleaming, unbroken cloud that stretched away to infinity like a perpetual field of snow, as monotonous but more inspiring than the endless vista of forest had been.

  *Instrument that indicates the height of the aeroplane above sea or ground level.

  Biggles was by no means happy at this new state of affairs. Before, engine failure would have meant a crash, a pancake on the top of the trees below, but he could at least see where he was going and brace himself against the moment of impact. The result would now be the same except that he could see nothing; it would be the difference between collision in broad daylight and collision in pitch darkness. 'Still, why anticipate trouble?' he thought with a shrug of his shoulders. Algy nudged him and pointed. Away to the left, a pale blue pinnacle which seemed to have been built on the cloud itself pointed upwards like a threatening finger a full three thousand feet above them. Behind it were others, some larger, some smaller, some perfectly pointed, others rough and jagged, as if they had been broken off with a mighty hammer.

  Biggles knew he was gazing at the advance guards of the Cordillera, the great Andean range that stretches like the backbone of the world down the Pacific seaboard of America. He glanced at his altimeter-fifteen thousand feet. He tilted his nose up slightly and climbed more steeply, wondering how much longer his petrol would hold out under the extravagant expenditure. At eighteen thousand feet he passed the first gigantic sentinel, towering like a cold, grim fortress in some fantastic fairy-tale. Then he passed others, threading his way through them like a mariner in a sea of icebergs, but instead of blue water under his keel it was a rolling ocean of opaque white vapour. It was a scene of desolation and unutterable loneliness, as one imagines the surface of the moon.

  As he stared anxiously ahead for a break in the sea of mist, he wondered what lay below. 'More mountains, I suppose,' he mused. He studied his map closely, and decided that they must now be well over Bolivia, but they might as well have been over the North Pole for all the assistance the map gave him.

  His engine spluttered and faded out as his main tank ran dry, and he switched over to the gravity tank that contained their last remaining petrol; it would last perhaps half an hour at most. If the clouds still persisted at the end of that time, he would have to come down, whatever lay below. Half an hour! A lot could happen in that time, but the immediate prospect was not alluring. The minutes ticked by and still no sign of a break in the clouds appeared. Biggles's face began to look old and worn. For himself he did not mind; it was the thought of Dickpa, helpless in the cabin, to whom he felt morally responsible for their present predicament.

  Another twenty minutes passed, and he bit his lower lip under the strain. .Fortunately the peaks were behind him now, but he had no means of knowing if lesser ones thrust their rugged peaks into the cloudbank below. He might strike one the instant he attempted to glide down, in which case the Condor and its crew might lie, a broken wreck, undiscovered until the very end of time itself upon some unscalable peak in a world of snow and ice.

  His altimeter was useless. He had set it to suit the altitude of their last landing-place on the prairie, which was fifteen hundred feet above sea-level. The ground below them now might rise to any altitude up to fifteen thousand feet. Vaguely he recalled that the centre of Bolivia was a vast tableland more than ten thousand feet above sea-level, and that Alto de la Paz, the aerodrome of the Bolivian Air Force, was situated at four thousand feet higher than that.

  He hoped fervently that the clouds were thin, or, at least, that they did not reach to the ground, so that when the inevitable forced landing became necessary he would be able to 'pancake,' which might not be so disastrous as diving nose first into the ground.

  Three minutes left. He glanced hopelessly to the left and then to the right to see if there was any break in that direction.

  Thirty feet away from his right wing-tip, and rapidly overhauling him, was another aeroplane. Had it been a whale or an elephant soaring through the air it could not have been more completely paralysing in its effect on him. He did not move; he could only stare, his jaw sagging foolishly.

  During the War, and even on the present expedition, he had had many shocks and had learned to be prepared for the unexpected to happen at any time; but this was too much, and for the first time in his life he thought his senses were playing him false. For a moment he thought it might be his own shadow on an invisible cloud, or some sort of miraculous mirage such as occurs in the desert, but he quickly discarded the idea as impossible as he recognized the
machine as a three-engined Junkers. The pilot was beckoning frantically to him, obviously trying to convey some signal, which he presently interpreted to mean that he was to follow him. With his brain still reeling from the shock, he instinctively, moved the joystick in the necessary direction, but with a choking splutter the engine cut out dead, and an instant later the Condor was enveloped in a sea of swirling grey mist.

  The next few minutes, during which it gradually grew darker as they sank into the cold heart of the cloud, were a nightmare that haunted both pilots for many a day. Biggles held the stick back until the Condor was almost stalling along, the speed indicator quivering on the fifty-five miles an hour mark, which, although comparatively slow, was a speed sufficient to dash them all to eternity should they strike a cliff. The fog became still more dense until it was impossible to see the wing-tips, and he began to grow dizzy from the strain of trying to keep the machine on an even keel, with no landmark to guide him.

  Nine thousand, eight thousand, seven thousand- the altimeter needle crept slowly down the dial. Where was the ground? Was it only fifty feet below? He did not know, and had no means of finding out. Algy drew his knees up to his chin and buried his face in his arms, a posture frequently adopted by many pilots and observers when they knew a crash is inevitable, the idea being that a human body, rolled up into the form of a ball as far as possible, is less likely to be broken or trapped in the wreckage.

  Six thousand five hundred! Biggles bit his lip until it showed white under the pressure; the strain was becoming unbearable. Then, suddenly, the mist cleared slightly as they emerged into a world of twilight, lashed by the soaking downpour of a tropical rainstorm. The ground loomed darkly two hundred feet below.

  A swift penetrating glance and he knew they were lost. They were over forest-not the flat forest of the Amazon basin, but great tree-clad slopes. In one place only was the ground anything like level, but even that was broken by tangled patches of shrub and loose boulders. He side-slipped steeply towards it, for it represented their best chance-not to save the machine, for that was out of the question, but their lives. In that critical moment the pilot's skill and nerve did not desert him. He zigzagged, under perfect control, between several great trees that rose a full hundred feet into the air, missing them by inches, levelled out, and then, as the machine sank towards the earth, pulled the stick back into his stomach. The wheels hit a boulder with a bump that shot the machine twenty feet into the air again. The Condor wallowed sickeningly as she lost flying speed and plunged earthwards again. The wing-tip struck a rock, swinging the machine round at right-angles, and then, with a crash of breaking timber and ripping fabric, thrust itself far into a clump of bushes and came to a standstill.

  For a moment all was silent except for the spatter of the teeming rain. Then, 'Well, we're still alive, anyway,' came Dickpa's voice from within the cabin.

  'We are, but we've no right to be,' replied Biggles with a nervous, high-pitched laugh. 'Great jumping-cats, if this is civil flying, give me war flying every time-it's child's play compared with this. Well, it looks as if the poor old Condor's made her last flip; pity we couldn't have got her back after all she's been through.'

  He eyed the wreckage of the once trim amphibian sadly. One wing-tip had been completely torn off where it had struck the rock; the undercarriage was a tangled mass of struts, torn tyres, and bent wheels, while the fabric on the wings was ripped and torn in many places. 'It isn't so bad as one might expect,' he observed, casting a professional eye over the damage. 'What do you think about it, Smyth?'

  'No, it isn't,' agreed the old flight-sergeant. 'The main members are still intact, which is the most important thing. She'll never fly out of this place, of course, even if we were able to repair her, but I should say that if we were in a civilized country it would be possible to get her repaired.'

  'Well, we're not, and, if appearances are anything to go by, we are in just about the most uncivilized country in the world,' observed Algy gloomily.

  'I wonder where we are,' muttered Dickpa. 'One thing is certain, we can't do anything while this downpour lasts; let's all get into the cabin; we might as well make ourselves as comfortable as possible.'

  The awkward angle at which the hull had come to rest was hardly comfortable, yet it did at least protect them from the drenching rain, which added to the general depression occasioned by the loss of the machine.

  'All the same, it might have been a lot worse, believe me,' exclaimed Biggles optimistically as they foraged among their rapidly dwindling provisions. 'By the way, I had a most extraordinary experience just as we dropped into the cloud. Do you know, I saw another machine flying alongside us-at least, I thought I did, but now I'm not so sure about it.'

  'Another machine!' cried Dickpa incredulously.

  'Wait a minute, why not?' broke in Algy in a flash of inspiration. 'What sort of a machine was it?'

  'A three-engined Junkers.'

  'And we're in Bolivia, aren't we?'

  'We must be well over the border,' declared Dickpa.

  'Then it might have been one of the machines of the Lloyd Aero Boliviana; they've got an air line here, you know; it connects the principal towns in Bolivia. I remember reading about it, and seeing some pictures of their machines-yes, they were Junkers, too.'

  'Well, that must be the answer,' rejoined Biggles. 'It was a tri-motor Junkers, I saw, I'm quite sure about that.'

  'What a bit of luck,' went on Algy, spreading some jam over a biscuit. 'If the pilot saw us, he'll be certain to come and look for the crash when he finds we haven't arrived anywhere-or he will as soon as the weather clears.'

  'That puts a different complexion on things,' smiled Dickpa. 'I was not so worried about the loss of the machine, which has really served its purpose now, as I was about the possibility of finding we were down in the Yungas country somewhere. That's a terrible place, rotten with fever. So it looks as if all we can do is to wait for morning and see what it brings forth.'

  Chapter 18

  Conclusion

  They awoke the following morning to find the landscape shrouded in dense white fog. It was cold, too, and Dickpa insisted on them all taking a big dose of quinine. 'We shall all find ourselves down with fever if we don't take care,' he prophesied, as he stamped briskly up and down. 'This is proper fever weather. I wish this confounded fog would lift; we can't do a thing while it lasts; but the sun will soon shift it when it gets a bit higher.'

  Smyth soon had a brisk fire burning, over which they crouched while they consumed hot coffee and biscuits.

  'What is it, Dickpa-are you trying to read the future?' asked Biggles, noticing that his uncle was staring into the fire with a curious expression on his face.

  'No-o, I was looking at that stone,' replied Dickpa slowly, pointing to a piece of rock that had been used to balance the kettle over the fire.

  'Why, what's wrong with it?' enquired Biggles curiously.

  'Nothing's wrong with it,' answered Dickpa quickly. 'Take a look at it yourself, though. Notice anything?'

  The others turned puzzled eyes on the side of the rock nearest the fire at which Dickpa was pointing. Across it ran several uneven, pale grey lines; the effect was not unlike a stone across which a snail had crawled, leaving a thin shining trail. A tiny bead was oozing down it.

  Dickpa reached out and picked up a piece of rock that lay near by. He balanced it for a moment in the palm of his hand, as if trying to judge its weight, and then, producing a small magnifying-glass from his pocket, he examined it closely. 'There's metal in this,' he announced.

  'What-gold?' cried Algy.

  'No, not gold, I'm afraid,' answered Dickpa, 'but I should say it is silver. Look! You can see traces of it with the naked eye; metal has to exist in fairly large quantities before you can do that. If it is silver, it looks as if we've struck something that might make us well off, if not rich, after all. There must be a vein of it somewhere handy.' He walked towards a sharp rise in the ground that loomed darkly in the f
og. In one place there had recently been a minor landslide, caused possibly by the action of the recent heavy rains, for a mass of torn and tangled vegetation lay at the foot, exposing the bare face of the hill. 'There it is!' he cried instantly, pointing to a broad diagonal line that stood out boldly on the face of the rock. 'By Jove, what an amazing coincidence that we should literally crash on to the very place that a prospector might spend his life looking for. Not a word about this to anybody. I'll put a few pieces in my case and get it assayed as soon as we reach civilization,' he told the others, who were listening open-mouthed.

  'It doesn't look as if we're likely to tell anyone in this place, so I shouldn't worry on that score,' observed Biggles, grinning. 'Hooray, here comes the sun!'

  The others joined him in a cheer as the grey fog lifted suddenly, as if it had been drawn up by an invisible hand. It grew lighter rapidly; the mist became a blinding white glare, and then the sun broke through and the moisture-drenched landscape lay before them. They realised instantly and for the first time how lucky they had been in the forced landing. To the east the ground fell away quickly, with the forest increasing in density at the lower altitudes, until at last it stretched in an unbroken jungle to the distant horizon. On the other three sides, steep hills, partly covered with patches of stunted cedar-trees, rose from the narrow shelf on which they had crashed and prevented them from seeing what lay beyond.

  'Luck's a funny thing, isn't it?' soliloquized Biggles philosophically. 'I've seen a fellow spin into a tree from a thousand feet and get away with a broken nose; and another fellow touches his wheels on a sunken road as he comes in to land, somersaults, and breaks his neck. If we'd come down one minute earlier or later we must have gone nose first into the side of a hill or into the thick forest. We've had some luck on this show, taking it all round-Hello, here she comes!' he went on excitedly, pointing to the sky, whence came the roar of a high-powered aeroplane. 'It's the Junkers-looking for us, too, by the way he's circling. Chuck some green stuff on to the fire so that he'll see the smoke.' As he spoke he tore up an armful of brushwood and flung it on to the fire; the others did the same, and a tall column of thick white smoke rose like a pillar into the air.