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Kieff.
    If anything went wrong he was to land and burn the machine, and get away back to Russia with the plates by land.
    I stared at him incredulously. "I never heard of night flying like that," I said. "It's absolutely crazy. Do you mean to say you took it on?"
    He smiled a little bitterly. "I wanted that thousand. You see, I'm getting towards the end of my time out there. Yes, I took it on. I made damn sure about the money, though. I had it paid into my bank at Croydon by the Trade Delegation, and I wouldn't stir a finger till I had a letter from the manager about it in his own handwriting. That made it as certain as it could be—and when I got that I carried on with the preparations."
    He began upon a long, technical description of the machine and its equipment for this flight. It was many years since I had [Pg 29] had to do with aeroplanes, and much of what he told me passed over my head. I was afraid to put him off his tale by asking questions. He said that they had several of those Breguets in the school at Kieff, and he chose one of them for the job. And he told me, in a mass of technicalities, that they had a propeller for that machine which at slow speeds was very quiet.
    Now half the noise of an aeroplane comes from the propeller. Virtually they had washed that out; they set to work then and built a silencer for the exhaust of the engine. They made the machine into a single-seater, and fitted her with fuel tanks for about fifteen hours' flight. By the time they'd finished with her they had a machine which would fly from Hamburg to Portsmouth and back in a night, and would keep in the air without losing height . . . silently.
    "We did two machines like that," he said. "One for a reserve, in case anything happened to mine. We fixed it that old Keumer should fly the reserve one if it was necessary. By the time we'd done with mine she'd fly at about eighty so quietly that you could hear the rustle of a map as you unfolded it in the cockpit. It gave me a queer start the first time I heard that. And they couldn't hear her on the ground at all when she was a couple of hundred metres up."
    They had one or two rehearsals of the photography, using a parachute flare, and then they were ready.
    "What day's this?" he asked suddenly.
    "Thursday," I said. "Or I suppose it's Friday by this time."
    He thought for a little. "We were all ready last week. I started for Germany on Sunday night."
    The landing-place in Germany was between Lubeck and Elmshorn, a little to the north of Hamburg. The flight, by the route he took, was about seven hundred and fifty miles; he took about six and three-quarter hours to do it. He left Kieff with a full load of fuel at about five o'clock in the afternoon, mid-Europe time, and set a compass course for the Baltic. It was a very dark night, and the ground was covered with snow. He said that it was very cold.
    He flew most of the way at about five thousand feet. The [Pg 30] Breguet wasn't a silent machine at her cruising speed by any means, and he didn't want to wake the Poles up down below. Between Kieff and Danzig he didn't check his course at all. He just sat there watching his compass and trying to fight the miseries of cold, and when he had been in the air for four hours he came down to about a couple of hundred feet to see where he was.
    He saw the lights of a village on the snow, and he nearly hit a hill in trying to get down lower to see the sort of country he was over. Upon that he went up again and carried on for another twenty minutes. At the end of that time he found that he was over sea.
    He thought it out, and came to the conclusion that he must be to the east of his course, since there was a westerly wind blowing and he had seen no sign of Danzig on the coast. Accordingly he swung round and set a course south-west by south to hit the coast again, and in a few minutes he had picked up the lighthouse at Putzig.
    That gave him his position, and he set to flying along the coast towards