thing. It is
superficial. Just as a man's skin is infinitely more sensitive than
anything inside.... Once you have forced yourself or have been forced
through the outward fear into vivid action or experience, you feel very
little. The worst moment is before things happen. Rowe, the African
sportsman, told me that he had seen cowardice often enough in the
presence of lions, but he had never seen any one actually charged by a
lion who did not behave well. I have heard the same thing of many sorts
of dangers.

"I began to suspect this first in the case of falling or jumping down.
Giddiness may be an almost intolerable torture, and falling nothing of
the sort. I once saw the face of an old man who had flung himself out
of a high window in Rome, and who had been killed instantly on the
pavement; it was not simply a serene face, it was glad, exalted. I
suspect that when we have broken the shell of fear, falling may be
delightful. Jumping down is, after all, only a steeper tobogganing, and
tobogganing a milder jumping down. Always I used to funk at the top
of the Cresta run. I suffered sometimes almost intolerably; I found
it almost impossible to get away. The first ten yards was like being
slashed open with a sharp sword. But afterwards there was nothing but
joyful thrills. All instinct, too, fought against me when I tried high
diving. I managed it, and began to like it. I had to give it up because
of my ears, but not until I had established the habit of stepping
through that moment of disinclination.

"I was Challoner's passenger when he was killed at Sheerness. That was
a queer unexpected experience, you may have supposed it an agony of
terror, but indeed there was no fear in it at all. At any rate, I do not
remember a moment of fear; it has gone clean out of my memory if ever it
was there. We were swimming high and fast, three thousand feet or so, in
a clear, sweet air over the town of Sheerness. The river, with a
string of battleships, was far away to the west of us, and the endless
grey-blue flats of the Thames to the north. The sun was low behind a
bank of cloud. I was watching a motor-car, which seemed to be crawling
slowly enough, though, no doubt, it was making a respectable pace,
between two hedges down below. It is extraordinary how slowly everything
seems to be going when one sees it from such an height.

"Then the left wing of the monoplane came up like a door that slams,
some wires whistled past my head, and