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Outside Magazine, August 2004

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The Hard Way
Goodnight Sweet Prince
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry spent his life defying and outflying death. Then it caught up.

By Mark Jenkins


	(Floc'h)

EN ROUTE TO CASABLANCA, flying north across the Sahara, the plane is lost. It is an inky, moonless night in the early 1930s. The two leather-helmeted men, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French pilot/poet destined to become the bard of the nascent art of aviation, and a man named Néri, his navigator, lean out of their plane and stare down at the desert, just a few hundred feet below. Through a cosmic sleight of hand, it has vanished. They peer through their goggles into a black abyss. Intermittent radio bearings from ports along the desolate Atlantic coast—Dakar, Cisneros, Agadir—have been unaccountably wrong and have pulled the aircraft far off course. The navigator has no idea where they are. The elementary control panel is of little help, although it does indicate that there is less than an hour of fuel left. Sensing that the plane is out over the ocean, rather than the desert, the pilot arcs the craft to the right.

To go down in the ocean is certain, if not entirely disagreeable, death. (Drowning, Saint-Exupéry will later tell a reporter, would be his choice of endings: "You don't feel yourself dying. You simply feel as if you're falling asleep and beginning to dream.") But at this point in his career, ardently in love with the adventure of flying the mail back and forth over the blazing Sahara, Saint-Exupéry is not ready for death. Better to ditch in the desert, as he has been forced to do many times before. Shipwrecked in a sea of sand, you have some chance of rescue before you either die of thirst or are captured or killed by Saharan tribesmen.

Soon they are sailing through a miasma of clouds and fog. Néri is passing notes to Saint-Exupéry. "No bearings. No bearings." The pilot is left to navigate on passion and instinct—traits fortuitously acute in this airman. (One colleague will later say, "When the flight is normal, Saint-Exupéry is dangerous; given complications, he's brilliant.") These are the daring early years of aviation; one mail pilot has died almost every month. Humans have been crossing deserts by camel for millennia, sailing seas for a thousand years, climbing mountains for a hundred—the sky is the last great terra incognita for adventurers.

The wood-and-metal airplane, a French-made Latécoère 26, is plummeting through a void. Up could be halfway down or three-quarters sideways. The compass needle jerks erratically, the fuselage shudders, the wings creak. Néri has begun to pray. Saint-Exupéry steers the aircraft and dreams of the calming familiarities of earth. Laughter. A bowl of hot milk and coffee in a Moroccan café.

He has had multiple near misses, most of them in his primitive Breguet 14, a slow, ungainly biplane he flew for about a decade. It had no real nose but rather a flat forehead plugged with a giant wooden propeller. The Breguet 14's singular redeeming attribute was a noble resoluteness founded upon mechanical simplicity. With a control panel hardly more sophisticated than that of a Ford Model T, it would still fly with a broken tail, flopping wing, or coughing engine. Saint-Exupéry, an intuitive mechanic, crash-landed the Breguet many times, repairing its Renault 300-horsepower engine with a hammer and screwdriver, and then lifting right back into the sky. (Years afterward he would elegize the obsolescence of the Breguet 14. For him, there was no charm in modern airplanes. They were soulless rockets, and flying one was a "bureaucratic affair . . . a life without surprises.")

Saint-Exupéry was FLYING A SOPHISTICATED AIRCRAFT he detested and marginally understood. HIS LUCK WAS DRIBBLING AWAY.

There was an uncanny resemblance between the pilot and his favorite airship. On the ground, in old black-and-white photos, both the Breguet 14 and Saint-Exupéry appear bulky and awkward. Saint-Exupéry was a head taller than most men, clumsy and uncomfortable in his bearlike form. (In his 1942 book Flight to Arras, a nonfiction account of the fall of France in WWII, Saint-Exupéry described his body as a "flunky" that he was required to dress, bathe, and feed. "It is in your act that you exist, not in your body.") Unkempt, two thick fingers pinching a hand-rolled cigarette, a quizzical expression on his face, Saint-Exupéry, despite the regal name, was patently unheroic in appearance, an outsized man who might have been mistaken for a provincial baker.

But put the hulking Frenchman into the cockpit of a plane and send them into the sky together, and a transformation occurred. The wings became extensions of Saint-Exupéry's arms, the cables became his tendons, the enormous, fallible engine his own thundering heart. Man and machine became one—a graceful, athletic, airborne organism. "The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature," Saint-Exupéry wrote, "but plunges him more deeply into them." Suddenly, in the black night sky, a pinprick of light is spotted off the nose of the plane. It must be the beacon of an airport! Néri bursts into song from sheer relief. Saint-Exupéry swings the craft toward the tiny light.
Then it vanishes.

Another diamond of light springs from the murk. Néri believes it can only be the Cisneros airport, in Spanish Sahara. He radios a request that the airport flash the light three times. The incandescent speck they are pursuing doesn't so much as blink. Saint-Exupéry has been chasing stars. "And with that we knew ourselves to be lost in interplanetary space among a thousand inaccessible planets," he writes in his 1939 memoir Wind, Sand and Stars, "we who sought only one veritable planet, our own, that planet on which alone we should find our familiar countryside, the houses of our friends, our treasures."

Believing their fuel now depleted, they prepare to drop to earth, to crash into the savage Sahara. But then a radio call from their base in Toulouse, France, reaches them, providing bearings and a reprieve: "Your reserve tank bigger than standard. You have two hours' fuel left. Proceed to Cisneros."

Once again Saint-Exupéry escapes disaster through some ineffable alliance of luck and faith, ability and hubris. It's the story of his life, and the reason why his death, a decade later, would haunt his readers and admirers for years.

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Outside columnist MARK JENKINS's latest book is The Hard Way.

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