Publisher's Synopsis
An excerpt from the beginning:
I - Arrival
A FAINT but penetrating hum grew in the sunset over Lisbon. It was an alien sound to the old city beside the Tagus. It seemed to have no location, but to diffuse itself through the sky, growing in volume and intensity.
Suddenly with a jet of steam the U. S. S. Shawmut and the U. S. S. Rochester sent a shrilling answer.
"There she is!" came a voice, cutting the great spaces like a thin ray of light.
Sirens, guns of Forts San Julian and Bugio, cannon of Portuguese warships, and the shouts of innumerable men on land and water echoed from wall to wall of the natural amphitheatre. A silhouette became visible against rosy banners of cloud. It gathered definite shape, the noise of its motors became loud and thundering. With a gleam of wings the NC-4, completing the first flight ever made by men across the Atlantic ocean, dove in a wide spiral toward the river and came to rest upon it as lightly as the vessel of a dream.
There was a moment's pause.
Lisbon, lying in the black and gold of a dying May 27, 1919, seemed to ponder on the achievement. Did an intangible sadness, a regret, tinge the moment for her? Once she had her heroes and her navigators. Somewhere, among her terraced hills and her half a million people, walked the ghosts of John the Great, Vasco da Gama, Cabral, Prince Henry the Navigator; of Amerigo Vespucci, even - name-giver to a new continent. And here, in 1709, in the Palace of the Indies, occurred one of the earliest aeronautical demonstrations. Bartholomeo - Lourenco de Gusmao had on that day sent a globe to the ceiling of the Hall of Ambassadors before the assembled court - a ball "borne up by certain materials which burned and which the inventor himself had ignited." Where were the explorers now? Where were those who inspired to conquer the air, to fulfill Gusmao's promise of a "machine competent to journey through the air faster than over land or sea, to carry messages five or six hundred miles a day to troops, and even adequate to explore regions about the poles?" They were there, but they were invaders. They awakened Portugal from a dream, shattering her peace with the thunder of their engines and, the flash of strange and amazing wings.