lised what a gale I was in.
I had been going westward, and perhaps even in gusts north of west, at a
pace of fifty or sixty miles an hour.

Then I began what I suppose would be called a Fight against the east
wind. One calls it a Fight, but it was really almost as unlike a fight
as plain sewing. The wind tried to drive me westwardly, and I tried to
get as much as I could eastwardly, with the wind beating and rocking us
irregularly, but by no means unbearably, for about twelve hours. My
hope lay in the wind abating, and our keeping in the air and eastward of
Finisterre until it did, and the chief danger was the exhaustion of our
petrol. It was a long and anxious and almost meditative time; we were
fairly warm, and only slowly getting hungry, and except that my uncle
grumbled a little and produced some philosophical reflections, and began
to fuss about having a temperature, we talked very little. I was tired
and sulky, and chiefly worried about the engine. I had to resist
a tendency to crawl back and look at it. I did not care to risk
contracting our gas chamber for fear of losing gas. Nothing was less
like a fight. I know that in popular magazines, and so forth, all such
occasions as this are depicted in terms of hysteria. Captains save their
ships engineers complete their bridges, generals conduct their battles,
in a state of dancing excitement, foaming recondite technicalities at
the lips. I suppose that sort of thing works up the reader, but so far
as it professes to represent reality, I am convinced it is all childish
nonsense, schoolboys of fifteen, girls of eighteen, and literary men
all their lives, may have these squealing fits, but my own experience
is that most exciting scenes are not exciting, and most of the urgent
moments in life are met by steady-headed men.

Neither I nor my uncle spent the night in ejaculations, nor in humorous
allusions, nor any of these things. We remained lumpish.

My uncle stuck in his place and grumbled about his stomach, and
occasionally rambled off into expositions of his financial position and
denunciations of Neal--he certainly struck out one or two good phrases
for Neal--and I crawled about at rare intervals in a vague sort of way
and grunted, and our basketwork creaked continually, and the wind on our
quarter made a sort of ruffled flapping in the wall of the gas chamber.
For all our wraps we got frightfully cold as the night wore on.

I must have dozed, and it was still dar