Tales of Terror Mystery | Page 4

pronounced by the Home Office experts to be blood--probably human
and certainly mammalian. The fact that something closely resembling
the organism of malaria was discovered in this blood, and that
Joyce-Armstrong is known to have suffered from intermittent fever, is a
remarkable example of the new weapons which modern science has
placed in the hands of our detectives.
And now a word as to the personality of the author of this
epoch-making statement. Joyce-Armstrong, according to the few
friends who really knew something of the man, was a poet and a
dreamer, as well as a mechanic and an inventor. He was a man of
considerable wealth, much of which he had spent in the pursuit of his
aeronautical hobby. He had four private aeroplanes in his hangars near
Devizes, and is said to have made no fewer than one hundred and

seventy ascents in the course of last year. He was a retiring man with
dark moods, in which he would avoid the society of his fellows.
Captain Dangerfield, who knew him better than anyone, says that there
were times when his eccentricity threatened to develop into something
more serious. His habit of carrying a shot-gun with him in his
aeroplane was one manifestation of it.
Another was the morbid effect which the fall of Lieutenant Myrtle had
upon his mind. Myrtle, who was attempting the height record, fell from
an altitude of something over thirty thousand feet. Horrible to narrate,
his head was entirely obliterated, though his body and limbs preserved
their configuration. At every gathering of airmen, Joyce-Armstrong,
according to Dangerfield, would ask, with an enigmatic smile: "And
where, pray, is Myrtle's head?"
On another occasion after dinner, at the mess of the Flying School on
Salisbury Plain, he started a debate as to what will be the most
permanent danger which airmen will have to encounter. Having
listened to successive opinions as to air-pockets, faulty construction,
and over-banking, he ended by shrugging his shoulders and refusing to
put forward his own views, though he gave the impression that they
differed from any advanced by his companions.
It is worth remarking that after his own complete disappearance it was
found that his private affairs were arranged with a precision which may
show that he had a strong premonition of disaster. With these essential
explanations I will now give the narrative exactly as it stands,
beginning at page three of the blood-soaked note-book:
"Nevertheless, when I dined at Rheims with Coselli and Gustav
Raymond I found that neither of them was aware of any particular
danger in the higher layers of the atmosphere. I did not actually say
what was in my thoughts, but I got so near to it that if they had any
corresponding idea they could not have failed to express it. But then
they are two empty, vainglorious fellows with no thought beyond
seeing their silly names in the newspaper. It is interesting to note that
neither of them had ever been much beyond the twenty-thousand-foot
level. Of course, men have been higher than this both in balloons and in

the ascent of mountains. It must be well above that point that the
aeroplane enters the danger zone--always presuming that my
premonitions are correct.
"Aeroplaning has been with us now for more than twenty years, and
one might well ask: Why should this peril be only revealing itself in
our day? The answer is obvious. In the old days of weak engines, when
a hundred horse-power Gnome or Green was considered ample for
every need, the flights were very restricted. Now that three hundred
horse-power is the rule rather than the exception, visits to the upper
layers have become easier and more common. Some of us can
remember how, in our youth, Garros made a world-wide reputation by
attaining nineteen thousand feet, and it was considered a remarkable
achievement to fly over the Alps. Our standard now has been
immeasurably raised, and there are twenty high flights for one in
former years. Many of them have been undertaken with impunity. The
thirty-thousand-foot level has been reached time after time with no
discomfort beyond cold and asthma. What does this prove? A visitor
might descend upon this planet a thousand times and never see a tiger.
Yet tigers exist, and if he chanced to come down into a jungle he might
be devoured. There are jungles of the upper air, and there are worse
things than tigers which inhabit them. I believe in time they will map
these jungles accurately out. Even at the present moment I could name
two of them. One of them lies over the Pau-Biarritz district of France.
Another is just over my head as I write here in my house in Wiltshire. I
rather think there is a third in the Homburg-