The nocturnal disturbances have become more common and it is an unusual night when I am not woken at least once by sounds of movement - rumbling, tapping, scraping. During the day these sounds seem to abate, but it may only be that I am out and about more at that time and naturally less sensitive to them.

Every day, as I say, I am out and about. Now that my subterranean home - for so I think of it - is becoming ever more well stocked with tins of food and other items salvaged from the El Dorado, and my future survival is at least a little more secure, I have more time for exploration. After I have done my essential morning duties - checking the mooring rope, filling a demijohn of water from the ballast tanks, checking the ship for signs of further damage - I have a modicum of leisure for other things, such as writing up the log or trying to learn more about this land where I have come aground.

It is clearly one of the places that was rejected by the first landers. It is steep and bare, rising to a rocky peak two thousand or more feet above tide level, with little horizontal ground to be found anywhere, and it supports only a small amount of scrubby vegetation of an older kind than may be found on the settled lands. The El Dorado came to rest on one of the few level parts of this land; a U-shaped valley on the northern side. It was fortuitous indeed that the winds carried her there for otherwise I should have had to climb all the way up the land from tide level.

Perhaps this is the right place for me to record how it was that my aerial idyll came to an end and I found myself once more standing on solid ground.

- 0 -

According to the ship's log I had been airborne for fourteen days. Although I may have intimated previously that my standards of log-keeping had occasionally been more nominal than fastidiously precise, I did my duty to the best of my abilities once I realised that my record might be the only formal document relating to the loss of the El Dorado and than any discrepancy or internal inconsistency in its contents would be certain to show up under a forensic semantics examination. Do you not see how careful I have been?

On the afternoon of the day before my coming to land, I had just taken lunch in the wardroom - a modest meal of biscuit and tinned meat - and, as was my habit by then, returned to the conning tower and my jury-rigged shelter for a snooze. The weather, as had been the case during the greater part of my voyage, was clear and sunny. I believe that I must have been drifting under the influence of one of the high-speed winds of the upper atmosphere which caused our forefathers such trouble when they first came to Glory and that these winds had been scouring the sky clean of clouds, for the weather had been uniformly bright.

I walked around the conning tower scanning the horizon over the prow and to port and starboard. The view in our direction of travel was, as usual, blocked by the upper vane but I had discovered that the best way to see around it was to go as near to the front of the ship as I could, then turn about and look behind me. Incidentally, I believe that the airmen must have used some kind of television apparatus to see astern, for naturally the lower vane hid the view from the bridge as effectively as the upper one obstructed the tower. I used my hand to shade the left side of my face from the sun and gazed at the junction between sea and sky. Nothing special… but… hmmm. Was that a cloud? I was not sure, but I made a mental note to take another look later on after I had read a few more pages of my book and taken a short nap.

This is a chronicle of factual events, not a work of fiction, and it is not my intention to try to engender an artificial tension and excitement in the reader by teasing him. I can safely leave that kind of thing to the likes of Mr Currer Bell of Earth, who was capable of drawing out the grand revelation of the plot of his novel over the space of many hundreds of pages. I could, I suppose, describe how it was that when I woke three or four hours later and looked astern the cloud had vanished, and how the following morning it had reappeared, and the puzzlement it caused me, but I am a man without imagination and, although I have the work of a master in front of me as I write, I have no mad wife hidden in the attic, nor any concealed and unlikely love to confess, nor yet the skill to describe such a discovery in an effective manner. So let me tell the story briefly and plainly.

When I ascended to the conning tower that following morning and discovered that the cloud was once more ahead (which is to say, astern) of the El Dorado it took me a while to understand its significance. It was only when it registered in my mind that the cloud was stationary - a fixture in the heavens - that I realised the implications. A fixed cloud in the sky must reflect a fixed land in the sea. Any practical airman can tell you that. The moisture-laden air from sea level is forced upwards when it encounters a land and the water-vapour it carries condenses out to form cloud. So far as I could ascertain this cloud, and the land it both indicated and concealed, was between five and ten miles off. I would pass very close by it. Of course, I did not expect to make landfall; I knew that the wind which carried the ship would fork when it struck the land and that the El Dorado would go to one or the other side of it.

Hour by hour, minute by minute, we drew closer. The form of this land became clear - a single mountain of two or three thousand feet with its peak wrapped in cloud. I regarded it with mixed feelings. One the one hand my trip had to come to an end eventually, so why not here? On the other, this land looked inhospitable, bare and, crucially, uninhabited. Anyway, it was out of my hands. The ship went where it would.

Soon, as I stood by the aft side of the conning tower with my back resting against its metal skin, both sides of the mountain came into view, split down the middle by the upper vane. Closer and yet closer and my ship and I were still headed directly towards the land. Surely our path would diverge soon. Surely. But now we were less than a mile away and the peak filled the sky, dominating it, eclipsing its azure beauty with an ugly jutting rampart of grey-brown rock. I stood transfixed as if held in a hypnotic trance; overwhelmed by terror and incapable of movement. Why did the El Dorado not veer to one side or another? The wind - did it blow straight through this land? Good God! It was too late! We were going to crash!

'Stop! Stop!' I shrieked, as disaster rushed towards me. I held up my impotent hand. 'Stop!'

And then, with a terrible grating, tearing roar the lower vane hit the side of the mountain. The ship screamed in pain as her weight crushed the vane against the rock of the land like a ruined limb, and her whole body convulsed in agony. The tail bucked, forced upwards by our forward momentum against the slope of the land, and I believe that I was tossed ten feet into the air by the shock of the impact. I fell hard on the other side of the conning tower and was thrown sideways across the ship's upper hull. All this time we continued to slide across the face of the land. The El Dorado slewed sideways, the ghastly metallic howls from below growing ever louder as the vane crumpled into the hull and the rear control station was torn off and tossed away like an unwanted toy. Somehow I clambered up the side of the hull and caught hold of the upper catwalk rail. I did not have the harness and slotted ring of the airmen to secure me, but I had desperation and a determination to survive. I held on to the rail with both hands, while the ship yawed and rolled and did her best to sling me to my death.

We had been flying at a height of about eight hundred feet above the ocean when we struck the land, moving at, I would estimate, a steady fifteen knots. That was a lot of height and a considerable speed and as we scraped over and around the mountain, with me hanging on for dear life lest I fall and be crushed between the hull and the fast-moving, stony ground, I began to wonder if we would in fact merely skid over the face of this land and, pushed onwards by the wind, drop off its far side. Although I could hear that appalling damage was being caused to the ship's underside, her upper portions where the lift tanks were housed were not at any risk and we remained buoyant, even as the ship's spine was bent up by the onward rush of our mad career.

It may seem as strange to you as it does to me, but my primary emotion as the ship ploughed across the land was one of terrible, grievous sorrow. She was too beautiful, my El Dorado, to be treated this way; wrenched apart, scarred and spoiled. Her lovely smooth lines distorted, her flawless skin scraped and torn, this joyous creature of the air pulled down and raped by the brutal earth. Even stronger than the fear of imminent death was that sorrow; and wasn't that strange? I find it hard to explain; how I could have so come to love this ship - this inanimate assemblage of fabric, metal and wire - that I felt her agony as keenly as if knives were slicing my flesh and flaying me alive.

Our mutual torture went on, and on, and on, for ever although I am sure that a stopwatch would have recorded that it lasted no more than half a minute. But eventually it ended, as even the most dreadful pain must end; in relief, sleep or death. Our motion ceased and I pulled myself up onto the catwalk, hardly noticing that my hands were bleeding and my body badly bruised. I looked around me, hanging on to the conning tower in a vain attempt to still my trembling arms and legs and saw that the El Dorado had come to rest in a valley cut by some long-gone glacier into the side of the mountain, with her stern jammed into a rising col at one end and her hull cradled by the valley sides, much as she might have lain in dock. I did not know how stable her position was, so I descended into the hull and attempted to make my escape from her.

I knew that the bridge must have been destroyed just as the rear station had been, but I was astonished as I climbed down the ladders and companionways that led past the lift tanks to the lower part of the hull to see how much of the vessel was still intact. I had thought that her frame would have been bent by the force of the impact but in fact all her internal lines were as straight or elegantly curved as they had ever been. This meant only one thing, as even such a non-airman as I must appreciate. The El Dorado's Ray was still in full working order and her tanks were still supporting her. Only a fraction of her real mass had struck the land. She might fly again! She might yet live!

- 0 -

I will not drag out this already overlong story with the details of how I abandoned the ship and found the cave which has become my shelter. You will appreciate, I am sure, that the ship's continued lift made her a dangerous place to stay in as a strong wind might at any time have picked her up and taken her out to sea once more. Although I had enjoyed - despite its underlying peril - my time on board the El Dorado when she was intact and undamaged, to set out once more in a crippled vessel was madness. So like Robinson Crusoe or Ben Gunn of fable I set up my home on the land and made of it the best I could; and like them I lived with no hope of rescue. I did not know how long I would last before starvation or thirst killed me, but I had learned one very important fact about myself; that I loved life and would do everything in my power to hold on to it. That was something well worth knowing, would you not say?