"Kipling, Rudyard - With the Night Mail" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kipling Rudyard)

With the Night MailWith the Night Mail
A Story of 2000 A.D.
by Rudyard Kipling



Editor's Notes by Blake Linton Wilfong
"With the Night Mail" (1905) and its sequel "As Easy as A.B.C."
(1912) predicted that by the year r 2000, airships (also called dirigibles)
would prove superior to airplanes, and rule the skies.
It almost happened! Consider: the first successful airship, a
steam-driven cigar-shaped balloon, flew 17 miles over Paris in 1852--more
than 50 years before Kitty Hawk. From 1910 to 1914, when airplanes were
still flimsy toys, the German Airship Transportation Company carried mail
and 35,000 passengers without fatality. In 1919, the British dirigible
R-34 made the first transatlantic round-trip flight. The gigantic German
airship Graf Zeppelin, over 800 feet long and 100 in diameter, flew around
the world in 1929. Only after the Hindenburg explosion of 1937 did
dirigible passenger service end. If the invention of the airplane had been
delayed just a few more years, we might be traveling in high-tech airships
today. So Kipling's stories now make a marvelous "alternate history".
Lighter-than-air conveyances had also already played major roles in
science fiction. Edgar Allan Poe's "The Balloon Hoax" (1844), Jules
Verne's Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), and Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer Abroad
(1894) all feature such craft.
"With the Night Mail" is narrated from the viewpoint of a journalist
accompanying a "postal packet" on an intercontinental mail run. I have
illustrated the story with photos of historic and modern airships as well
as some of the news reports and advertisements Kipling fabricated for its
magazine publication.



At 9:00 of a gusty winter night I stand on the lower stages of one of the
General Post Office outward mail towers. My purpose: a run to Quebec in "Postal
Packet 162 or such other as may be appointed"; the Postmaster General himself
has countersigned the order. This talisman opens all doors, even those in the
dispatching-caisson at the foot of the tower, where they are delivering the
sorted Continental mail. The bags lie packed close as herrings in the long gray
underbodies our G.P.O. still calls "coaches". Five coaches are filled as I
watch, and shot up the guides to be locked onto their waiting packets 300 feet
nearer the stars.
Mr. L. L. Geary, Second Dispatcher of the Western Route, courteously conducts me
from the dispatching-caisson to the Captains' Room where the mail captains come
on for their turn of duty. He introduces me to the captain of the "162"--Captain
Purnall, and his relief, Captain Hodgson. One is small and dark; the other large
and red; but each has the brooding sheathed glance characteristic of eagles and
aeronauts. You can see it in the pictures of our racing professionals, from L.
V. Rautsch to little Ada Warrleigh--that fathomless abstraction of eyes
habitually turned through naked space.