Antoine de Saint Exupery
1939
Under orders, I flew an empty ship down to Agadir. From Agadir, I was flown to Dakar as a passenger, and it was on that flight that the vast sandy void and the mystery with which my imagination could not but endow it first thrilled me. But the heat was so intense that despite my excitement, I dozed off soon after we left Port Etienne. Riquelle, who was flying me down, moved out to sea a couple of miles in order to get away from the sizzling surface of the sand. I woke up, saw in the distance the thin white line of the coast, and said to myself fearfully that if anything went wrong we should surely drown. Then I dozed off again.I was startled out of my sleep by a crash, a sudden silence, and then the voice of Riguelle saying, "Damn! There goes a connecting rod!" As I half rose out of my seat to send a regretful look at that white coast-line, now more precious than ever, he shouted to me angrily to stay as I was. I knew Riguelle had been wrong to go out to sea; I had been on the point of mentioning it; and now I felt a complete and savage satisfaction in our predicament. "This," I said to myself, "will teach him a lesson."But this gratifying sense of superiority could obviously not last very long. Riguelle sent the plane earthward in a long diagonal line that brought us within sixty feet of the sand - an altitude at which there was no question of picking out a landing-place. We lost both wheels against one sand dune, a wing against another, and crashed with a sudden jerk into a third."You hurt?" Riguelle called out."Not a bit," I said."That's what I call piloting a ship!" he boasted cheerfully.
