One midnight. In a time when most aircraft engines were round and reciprocating. Four of them are now hunched on our wings, snoring through the night.

I turn to look over my shoulder at our navigator, whose face is dimly outlined in the light reflected from his chart. He is watching a fly march across the spoke marks of his last celestial fix, frowning at the insect's migration, his eyes disapproving of its aimless course across a paper ocean.

"Where are we?"

The navigator shrugs his shoulders.

"It beats me. So I suppose we're lost."

He smiles. He is a very skillfull navigator, and we know each other well because we have spent hundreds of hours together on various flight decks. We are over the South Atlantic, bound from Brazil to Ascension Island, which is barely a pimple in the liquid immensity below. Our navigator knows almost exactly where we are, or were a few minutes ago, and he knows I know he knows. Else he would have warned me. It is his momentary amusement to pretend ignorance of our position -- a little game we play when the night is benign and all is going well.

Lost?

I turn away from the lingering smile and look out upon the wilderness of the night. Lost? Perhaps the navigator of this craft is not mocking me after all. For everywhere below is the hostile ocean, blacker than the night. And from this flight deck there is no visible measuring of its depth or dimensions. Everywhere above are glittering stars quite unmeasurable as the void below. Then it could be that we are lost, or at least so detached from the real world that all we have known, including our very aging, has temporarily ceased to be.

For the next several hours we could be space travelers hurtling through an infinite vacuum, truant from our ordinary lives. There is nothing aloft or alow to indicate movement. Nothing.

For how long and how many times have I been spellbound thus? Ten years, a little less. And still always I yearn for more of life aloft, a continuance of this marvelous removal. Ten years and 6,000 hours are not enough. There are no new prophetic powers given me by the night. I cannot foresee that after another score of years and yet another eight, and hours beyond 17,000, I will still hold an insatiable lust for the subtle charms of flight.

Once the sensual pleasure of controlling an aircraft is mastered, exhilaration diminishes and incurable habit takes command. Once the secretly nursed conviction that something dangerous and dramatic might happen -- with yourself as hero or victim -- is forgotten, then the heart joins the mind in submission to the nicromancy of flight. Pilots who have flown for fifty years are unable to shake it -- whatever it is.

Perhaps it is the same for all pilots. As on that South Atlantic night, when I brooded about such things, the same removal can be known repeatedly to everyone who has passed first solo.

Are we lost, or are we found at last? On earth we strive for our various needs, because so goes the fundamental law of man. Aloft, at least for a little while the needs disappear. Likewise, the striving.

In the thoughts of man aloft, good and evil become mixed and sometimes reversed. This is the open door to wisdom.

Aloft, the earth is ancient and man is young, regardless of his numbers, for there, aloft, he may reaffirm his suspicions that he may not be so very much. This is the gateway to humility.

And yet, aloft, there are moments when a man can ask himself, "What am I, this creature so important to me? Who is it rules me from birth to tomb? Am I but a slave destined to crawl from labor to hearth and back again? Am I but one of the living dead, or my god set free?" This is the invitation to full life.

To look down frequently from high position and inspect what men have wrought is to create a stinging sense of shame in all who are not blind. This is the embrace of hope.

Yet from aloft, what men do to each other or to themselves remains concealed. So hatred does not insult the eye, and defeat becomes invisible. This is the restoration of faith.

Flight is not thrilling, nor should its unique pleasures be compared with the voluptuousness of sex, the bawdy joys of drink, or the dubious dreams of opiates.

"Where are we?"

"If you really must know, I'll tell you."

"Never mind. Here aloft, we are not lost, but found."

McKay and Barnwell found the cockpit, or rather what ha been the cockpit. There was nothing left of the basic structure. The DC-4 had rammed the mountain almost head-on. McKay almost tripped over a section of instrument panel, the glass in the dials pulverized. He bent to examine them and his eyes caught the charred remnants of a brain bag off to one side. Just beyond it was the mud-stained first officer's hat, McKay shivered.

"Wonder where the cockpit seats are?" Barnwell muttered.

"They could have been thrown a hundred yards ahead, on the other side of this damned ridge."

"Want me to look?"

"No. We'd better wait. We'll be marking and charting every piece of this wreckage when they get the teams organized. My God, she really splashed. They never knew what hit 'em."

"I guess I'll just wander around," McKay gulped.

"Okay. You all right?"

"I may get sick."

"Go ahead. I did first time I saw one of these messes. You'll never really get used to it. Just immune."

McKay stumbled away, too ashamed to throw up in front of the captain. He tried to keep his eyes off the blackened stumps that were the bodies. He wondered which ones might be the crew. The odor of burned flesh was in his nostrils and it would stay there -- and in his mind -- for many more days. For the first time in his life he saw the pitiful and poignant residue of an airliner crash. The luggage with seams ripped open and leather hides slashed as if by a wanton knife. A gaily colored scarf. The charred pieces of mail, already being guarded by a postal inspector. A grimy, dirt-spattered girdle. A baby's rattle. A woman's dress shoe and a man's loafer. A bottle of aspirin, the pills mysteriously ground into white powder. A shredded, partially burned copy of Time flipped open to the Foreign News page. A toy airplane someone had picked up at an airport for his son. A coffee cup with the grounds still at the bottom. Inanimate objects that in a mute way spoke of sudden death.

He was wandering around when he spotted something that was only too familiar -- a stewardess' handbag. He knelt and opened it.

Inside was a wallet. Inside the wallet was Dorothy Martin's Midwest identification card. Her half-smiling picture on the card was like seeing a ghost. As he put the wallet back his hand touched a piece of paper. He took this out, for no reason except blatant curiosity. It was a copy of a charge slip from Garfinckel's department store. There was only one entry.

"Wedding Gown...........$75.89"

McDonald McKay vomited.

People often asked me why I liked being a pilot, why I flew the mail and took such chances of getting killed. I would try to explain, but never could find the words to explain it all. I knew that I could fly and fly well, and this skill set me apart from the run of the mill. I certainly had no wish to get killed, but I was not afraid of it. I would have been frightened if I had thought I would get maimed or crippled for life, but there was little chance of that. A mail pilot was usually killed outright. Then, too, sometimes I was called a hero, and I liked that.

One of the most rewarding things about a mail pilot's job was the high pay and the high percentage of leisure time, which made for a merry life, even if indications were that it might be short one. As a normal thing we worked two or three days a week, five or six hours a day, plus standing reserve perhaps one day a week, which only meant keeping the field advised how they might reach us. I spent my time unproductively as possible: learning to play golf, chasing girls, reading omnivorously and indiscriminately; investigating dives and joints and in the area; and -- an interest that has remained with me ever since -- trout fishing.

But what I could never tell of was the beauty and exaltation of flying itself. Above the haze layer with the sun behind you or sinking ahead, alone in an open cockpit, there is nothing and everything to see. The upper surface of the haze stetches on like a vast and endless desert, featureless and flat, and empty to the horizon. It seems your world alone. Threading one's way through the great piles of summer cumulus that hang over the plains, the patches of ground that show far below through the white are for earthbound folk, and the cloud shapes are sculptured just for you. The flash of rain, the shining rainbow riding completely around the plane, the lift over mountain ridges and crawling trains, the steady, pure air at dawn take-offs, and the smoke from the newly lit fires in houses just coming to life below -- these are some of the many bits that help pay for the tense moments of plunging through fog, or the somber thoughts when flying cortege for a pilot's funeral. It was so alive and rich a life that any other conceivable choice seemed dull, prosaic, and humdrum.