FIRST PAGE: Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Signet Classic, 1963.

Night Flight by Antoine De Saint-Exupery 1963 Signet Classic Aviation – Monster Books and Items

SYNOPSIS:

In a novel of rare beauty and power, Saint-Exupery charts the perilous world of pioneer aviation. Night Flight is the story of hazardous flights made by night through the dangers of darkness and the destructive splendor of sudden Andean storms. It is a story of men who risk their lives to deliver mail in flimsy crates...Fabien, the youthful pilot, who sees in flying a chance for heroic action...Riviere, his superior, who believes that man's salvation lies not in freedom but in the acceptance of duty.

"Aviation, like the exploration of uncharted lands has its early heroic age and Night Flight, which describes the tragic adventure of one of these pioneers of the air, sounds, naturally enough, the authentic epic note."

- Andre Gide

Page 1:

Already, Beneath Him, Through the Golden Evening---

Already, beneath him, through the golden evening, the shadowed hills had dug their furrows and the plains grew luminous with long-enduring light. For in these lands the ground gives off this golden glow persistently, just as, even when winter goes, the whiteness of the snow persists.

Fabien, the pilot bringing the Patagonia air-mail from the far south to Buenos Aires, could mark night coming on by certain signs that called to mind the waters of a harbor--a calm expanse beneath, faintly rippled by the lazy clouds--and he seemed to be entering a vast anchorage, an immensity of blessedness.

Or else he might have fancied he was taking a quiet walk in the calm of evening, almost like a shepherd. The Patagonian shepherds move, unhurried, from one flock to another; and he, too, moved from one town to another, the shepherd of those little towns. Every two hours he met another of them, drinking at its riverside or browsing on its plain.

Sometimes, after a hundred miles of steppes as desolate as the sea, he encountered a lonely farm-house that seemed to be sailing backwards from him in a great prairie sea, with its freight of human lives; and he saluted with his wings this passing ship.

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To continue reading, you may purchase this book at:

Night Flight by Antoine De Saint-Exupery 1963 Signet Classic Aviation – Monster Books and Items

An older Penguin version from 1945 can also be found here:

Night Flight by Antoine de St. Exupery Vintage 1945 Gilbert Penguin Pa – Monster Books and Items