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with both hands he was powerless to aid me. The plane was falling very fast but on an even keel, and I continued trailing it down through the air pocket with my feet high above the upper wing of the biplane, hanging on to the camera strap with just four fingers of one hand.
In my up-side-down position I could hear the wind whistling through the loose stays as the whirling propeller almost shook the wood and canvas to pieces. The propeller was turning twice as fast as it should and our greatest danger was that the engine would shake itself out of the frame before the propeller could bite into heavier air.
Even in my position, I was grateful to notice that the pilot was staring straight ahead with all his attention on manipulating the ship, and not watching my acrobatics. By this time we had dropped three hundred feet right along the face of the cliff and the plane was beginning to bounce as it hit the top of an up-draft. As the fall was being checked I pulled myself back to a standing position in the fuselage and }relled to George to grind. We got the next hundred feet of the fall in the camera, the result being that of the old Matterhorn jerking crazily in the air.
We came out of the drop, thanks to a clever pilot and after nearly scraping the rudder off on the cliff side, struck heavier air and were able to fly forward once more.
We circled the peak as we climbed, then passed over the top, clearing it by two hundred feet, and turned west. Thirty minutes later we were flying over the Northeast corner of Mt. Blanc, the highest peak in Europe and had reached an altitude of 17,000 feet. The thermometer stood at ten above zero on this beautiful August day, the tips of our ears were frozen and we only had a few feet of film left in the camera. As I was nearest the Swiss pilot, who only understood French or German, it was up to me to give1 him the orders. To listen he had to shut off the motor, and when you shut off the motor of an airplane it generally drops. Ours was no exception.
I tapped Gartier on the shoulder — he shut off the gas — the
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