Flight Log Entry
Date: Feb. 7, ’35 (Tarr 30, 1927)
Type of Machine: Romeo Ro.1
Number of Machine: I-STLA
Airfield: Beehive Hill Farm, Tazma Meda
Duration of Flight: 20 min
Character of Flight: Disastrous
Pilot: Momma
2nd Pilot or Pilot Under Training: Emilia Menotti
Remarks:
I still can’t land. UGH. I just worry about birds all the time. And I’m not likely to make a successful landing any time soon for two reasons: 1) I tore the tyre so now it needs patching, and 2) the Little Rains are about to start.
After Teo flew back here and did another of his beautiful, slow-floating-ibis-like landings while I greeted Ezra and Sinidu from the back by waving my shamma, Momma wanted to give me a chance to practise too. On my very first touchdown I was in such a panic about hitting a bustard which wasn’t even in my way that Momma snatched the controls away from me at the last second. Then I tore the tyre when I did manage to land.
I HATE LANDING.
It is nice to be back in Tazma Meda – nice to be back on Beehive Hill Farm, where everything feels so safe. We went up to the Big House to make a triumphant presentation of the receipt for the fuel delivery that is on its way (we beat it here because we flew), as well as the accumulated money we owe the Sinclairs for the sundry things we have borrowed, and everybody was feeling so relieved and pleased to have our good relations (and fuel) restored that the Sinclairs invited Momma to stay and share Captain Adessi’s Chianti with them. Afterward we had supper with Ezra and Sinidu.
‘That is the worst landing I have ever seen you make!’ Sinidu teased Momma.
‘That was Em,’ Momma said, shaking her head.
Teo said quickly, ‘There was a bustard on the field. We had to go around to avoid hitting it and ran over its nest on the landing run.’
‘Poor thing!’ Sinidu said. ‘But silly of it to nest before the rains!’
So I had an excuse. But I know I am bad at it all on my own without help from bustards flapping around all over the airfield.
This is one time when trying to think what White Raven would do is not going to help me one bit. White Raven taught herself to fly by watching people land on the beach where she was raised by wild ponies. (Delia and Momma did a flying show on Chincoteague Island for the firemen’s carnival in 1926, and me and Teo loved the swimming ponies.) I guess that both those White Raven details are pretty far-fetched. But until now I actually thought that White Raven teaching herself to fly was more realistic than her being raised by a herd of swimming ponies. Now I’m not so sure.
Episode from THE STORM BIRDS (1932?)
The strange plane struggled and fought to land on the dark beach, but the rising wind blew it out to sea. The best it could do was to put the wheels down on the sandbar. It got there just as the light faded. The tide was rising with the wind. Soon the sandbar would be covered.
White Raven could not see the pilot, but she knew there must be someone flying the plane. He might be all right if the plane did not float away or the water did not cover it completely.
‘No one but us can save that plane,’ White Raven said to her friends.
Hurricane and Seagrass and Willowbark stamped restlessly in the sand at the edge of the waves. Seagrass whinnied a sharp question.
‘I don’t need to ride – I will swim with you,’ White Raven answered. ‘Save your strength for the trip back.’
Hurricane tossed her head defiantly at the storm and they all pushed forward into the rising waves at the same time.
They could only see the sandbar when the lightning flashed, but finally they made it. The wheels of the flying machine were already underwater. Seagrass pushed his strong back beneath the aircraft’s wing on one side, and Hurricane and Willowbark took the other side. When the water rose high enough, they would be able to swim the plane to shore safely on their backs.
White Raven climbed up to look for the pilot. There was no one in the cockpit. She pulled herself up through the wires until she got to the top of the upper wing. There was the strange pilot! He had climbed up to get away from the waves. He was almost invisible against the dark sky, perched above his aircraft like a nesting bird.
He held out his hand for her to shake. ‘Selam!’ he cried. ‘Peace! My name is Black Dove! What are you doing out here in the ocean with this terrible storm coming? Looks like we are in the soup together!’
‘I’m White Raven!’ she answered as she shook his hand. ‘This island is my home and I am here to help you!’
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Did you notice that our names are a perfect match?’
Just then the plane floated free of the sandbar. Hurricane brayed a warning from underneath the wing she was helping Willowbark to hold up.
‘Hang on tight!’ White Raven yelled. ‘My friends are going to save your flying machine. But it might be a bumpy ride!’
Flight Log Entry
Date: April 15, ’35 (Miyazya 7, 1927)
Type of Machine: Romeo Ro.1
Number of Machine: I-STLA
Airfield: Tazma Meda to ‘Delia’s Dream’!
N 12° 58’ 10”, E 30° 50’ 29”
Duration of Flight: 1 hr 30 min
Character of Flight: Navigation training
Pilot: Momma
2nd Pilot or Pilot Under Training: Emilia Menotti
Remarks:
I still hate flying.
No amount of pretending I am White Raven is making me like it. It is only the thought of White Raven and her bravery and her adventurousness, etc. etc., that makes me able to march out to the stupid plane and climb into the stupid cockpit and take the stupid controls. I am disgusted with myself. But I am scared of it. How can I love being in the sky so much and be so scared to do it myself?
I am not even any good at driving the plane to the end of the field on the ground. I keep trying to go in a straight line, but of course I can’t see where I’m going because the nose is so high up. You’re supposed to weave back and forth. I nearly killed us all today and it was on the ground.
I’m good at finding my way across long distances. In that, I’m exactly like White Raven. I am good at it on the ground and I am good at it in the sky too. In flight it is all about timing and mental arithmetic. You get to use all of the things you think you’re never going to use – the compass Papà gave me for Christmas and the silver stopwatch he gave me for my twelfth birthday, and all those hours of Miss Shore torturing us with geometry and algebra and slide rules. Boy, am I glad she’s flown the coop, even if it does mean we never get another lick of education.
Today was the first morning after the rains when the sun came up and everything was suddenly green, and Momma came springing into the house to wake us up with so much bounce I thought it was Sinidu.
‘Teo, race down to Ezra and tell him we’re going away for a couple of days. I warned him I’d have to make this trip as soon as the rains were over. I have photographic work that’s already overdue and today’s the day!’
‘For a magazine?’ I asked.
‘If I’m lucky, some of the pictures might end up in a magazine. Teo, for goodness’ sake don’t let Sinidu come hiking up here with that new baby to make us breakfast when Emmy can do it herself. Emmy, up and at ’em, breakfast. And then I need you to plot the trip with me.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Aksum! Ras Assefa asked us to come. The holiest city in Ethiopia! And you two are coming with me. I have to take some photos, but we’ll make it into a holiday. We’ll see the standing stones and the chapel where they keep the Tabot of Zion, the real Ten Commandments. Isn’t that where Habte Sadek’s brother ended up? And we’ll visit Ras Amde Worku. Ras Amde Worku is the one who was helping to establish the Ethiopian Legation in France, the one Teo’s father worked for. Mateos told me he wants to meet Teo.’
Teo and I glanced at each other, wide-eyed. I could feel myself grinning. He
pulled on his shirt in about a second and took off with Momma’s message for Ezra.
‘I’m going to let you work out the whole course, Emmy,’ said Momma. ‘I’ll check it, but I want you and Teo to do as much of the work as possible, since this is our first really big flying trip together. It’ll be great practice and it’ll free me up to do the camerawork.’
Normally we love going on trips with Momma. This time I was worried about having to do the flying myself. ‘How far is it?’ I asked.
‘About three hundred miles. We could easily do it in one long flight, but I think it would be fun to make an overnight stop on the way,’ Momma said. ‘That way you two can take turns flying. And we’ll camp, like I do with Ezra and Sinidu when we make our flying clinic visits.’
‘Don’t we have to give the plane back to the Italians?’ I asked.
‘We’re in the clear as long as they still want us to take pictures for them. And we’ll be practically on the border anyway, up in Aksum. We can fly on to Eritrea and visit Papà Menotti.’
‘Momma, you’ve got a screw loose,’ I said. Because the last thing we need to do is make anybody think we are running errands for the Regia Aeronautica or conspiring with them or something. Even if we are. ‘Don’t you listen to the radio? Every time there’s news it’s about the Italian soldiers piling into Eritrea and Italian Somaliland. Waiting. It’s like the way those kids in New Marlow used to hang around outside the school just waiting for me and Teo to come out so they could take our pencils and pelt us with spitballs. And no one would ever do anything to stop them. The Misses Larson were just as useless as the League of Nations when Haile Selassie asks it for help.’
‘Don’t worry! We have friends on both sides here.’ Momma smiled her most fantastic and enthusiastic smile. It is darned hard not to be infected by her excitement when she’s looking forward to something.
Momma is not very patient with me, and we argued a lot over the windspeed calculations when we figured them out this morning. I know she knows more than I do, but she is so darn ambitious. She wants to go this wiggling, slow, scenic route over the Simien Mountains, but she also wants me and Teo to take turns flying the plane and neither one of us is really up to what she calls ‘canyon flying’, where you go scooting low down, close to the sides of the mountains. I am especially not up to it. I’m too jittery about the unpredictable wind that mountains make.
Actually I am too jittery about the whole airplane even when the wind is steady. That is the part Momma doesn’t really seem to understand. It is true she was scared about letting us take over the danged controls in the first place, but she still seems to think it will all come naturally once you’ve done it a couple of times. The fact that it is coming naturally to Teo is not helping me at all.
You’d think she’d remember how hard she had to work just to get someone to give her a lesson.
You know she hasn’t forgotten how Delia died.
We have come halfway to Aksum today and that is where we are now – camped on top of a tableland high in the Simien Mountains. It is all grass, very narrow and completely impossible to reach on foot. There aren’t even any goats up here. The only living things are bearded vultures nesting in the crags of the cliff. There were a lot of them soaring below us as we came in, but they were interested in wildlife down where the ridge isn’t as steep and they didn’t get in our way as we floated down from above. Up here there are no trees, no nothing, just flat grass on a plateau exactly the length and width of a runway.
It was one of my best landings ever. I was so relieved to be done and not to have hit a vulture on the way, and not to have to fly the rest of the way because it’s Teo’s turn tomorrow. I let the plane putter along across the plateau and I didn’t realise how narrow it was. I was trying to weave back and forth so I could see where I was going, and I didn’t realise how close we were to the edge until Momma suddenly yelled at me and stomped on the right rudder, shoving the power on at the same time to make the turn tighter to get us away from the edge. I was about to take us right over the cliff at about five miles an hour.
Momma took over taxiing and parked the plane right in the middle of the ridge. I sniffed quietly to myself for being such a stupid fraidy cat. Momma turned the engine off and then stood up in her cockpit and leaned over to give my shoulders a squeeze.
‘Come on, sweetie-pie. That was a beautiful landing! I’m not mad at you. Let’s get out and look around.’
Momma put her arms around our waists and we walked from one end of the ridge to the other before we set up our camp.
This tableland is empty and perfect and it is completely ours. There is no way anyone else in the world could have set foot here before. We are the first human beings ever to be here. Like explorers discovering America.
‘We can name it,’ Momma said.
‘Italy-Doesn’t-Know-It’s-Here,’ I said in Amharic.
‘Shangri-La,’ said Teo, which is a made-up paradise out of Lost Horizon from Vera Sinclair’s bookshelf. ‘Or Solomon’s Temple.’
Momma said firmly, ‘Delia’s Dream.’
Teo and I glanced at each other quickly and glanced away again before either of us giggled because Delia’s Dream is kind of corny. But we let Momma name it. Because that is why we’re here and that is what this place is. A place in the African sky that doesn’t belong to anybody. A place where war will never come.
It is incredibly quiet here. The Sinclairs sometimes have their generator going at night, or their dogs bark, or hyenas hoot in the bush, or there are bugs singing, but here there is no noise at all. It’s too cool for bugs because it is so high up. All I can hear is Momma breathing. She is lying on her back very quietly, looking at the sky, and Teo is lying on his stomach next to me, reading what I write.
I’ll have to stop writing when it gets dark because there is nothing to build a fire with up here. I know what he means now about how tired he was after he flew to Addis Ababa, because I am absolutely beat.
Hey White Raven.
You want to write, Teo?
I want to tell you those vultures scared me more than when you nearly drove over the edge of the cliff.
Me too. I hate flying.
Really? Really really? Or just right now?
I hate it all the time when I’m doing it.
Wow, don’t let Momma read that.
She’ll just think we’re working on The Adventures if she sees us taking turns with the pencil. Anyway, LOOK at her: she is way up in the clouds with Delia right now.
Yeah.
Hey Em, you know all that stuff you wrote about this place being empty and being ours? Explorers discovering America? You sounded just like Captain Adessi. ‘This is good land and it ought to belong to people who know how to appreciate it.’ You make it sound like we colonised this place.
Well, we did!
We didn’t. It doesn’t belong to anyone. You don’t know who owns this land. Maybe they have never been up here and maybe they never will. But just because you got to it first doesn’t make it yours.
You mad at me now, Em?
Stop pestering me when I’m trying to write a flight log entry.
Haha – this is one more flight log entry you will NEVER let Momma read.
I’m not mad at you. I’m thinking about what you said.
Flight Log Entry
Date: April 16 & 17, ’35
Type of Machine: Romeo Ro.1
Number of Machine: I-STLA
Airfield: Takazze Valley to Aksum/Aksum to Amba Kwala via Debre Damo
Duration of Flights: 1 hr 50 min, 1 hr 25 min
Character of Flight: Cross-country
Pilot: Momma
2nd Pilot or Pilot Under Training: Teodros Gedeyon
Remarks:
Momma says keep a log, even when you don’t want to.
Em spent so long after supper curled up in a corner crying, as if it was her and not me, that Momma finally told her to go take a walk and cool off. And Em just went. She won’t ge
t lost and if she does she can always ask anybody to direct her to Ras Amde Worku’s house, which is where we are staying. Momma did say he wanted to meet me.
I would have gone with Em, but we are not sure I’m allowed to.
So I’m just going to sit here and write about the last couple of flights till she gets back. There are plenty of candles. Ras Amde Worku is the wealthiest man I think we’ve ever stayed with. His house is stone and flat-roofed, three storeys high, like an old church. It is surrounded by gardens. He has got a collection of European glass and crystal chandeliers just like his brother Ras Assefa. I am writing beneath them, and the candlelight is being thrown back and forth in them like shooting stars. It is like being in a crystal cave. As though we have walked into a scene from The Land of Glass.
And guess what? There are pictures of Potez biplanes all over the house. Sergew was right.
Here, if I were being Black Dove, I would take a deep breath and make myself invisible so I can make a cool and clever escape. But I am not really Black Dove. No chance of going invisible now. I’ll take a deep breath anyway and write carefully, as if Miss Shore were going to read it. I will try to be organised.
There is no airfield in Aksum. There are plenty of fields outside the city where you can land a plane if you feel like it, and I guess most people choose the same one we did if they come here in a plane.
Aksum is as beautiful as we thought it would be, mysterious and a little strangely creepy. When we got here yesterday we flew all around the city – I flew all around the city – looking for a good place to land. Aksum is very easy to find because everything nestles in the fold of two hills at the edge of a wide upland plain, and right at the point where the hills come together is the two-thousand-year-old graveyard full of standing stones seventy feet tall. We saw them for the first time from the air and Momma got me to fly pretty low overhead. People came out and waved. Momma took pictures.