FRENCH ALPS: Machines are invading even the wildest places, even forests and mountain pinnacles. This afternoon I was climbing a mountain slope through the cool of the forest when a droning mechanical noise reached me from a solitary building that I saw among the trees. Wanting to ask my way, I knocked at the open door, knocked again, called, walked in; no one stirred. The machines were alone. There they lay like monstrous gods asleep in a temple, breathing so evenly that they seemed motionless, and gently snoring in their trance. The priest of the temple had lighted lamps before the gods and swept the floors, and then had left them unguarded in the quiet of the forest, trusting to the magic powers of the mountain water that feeds them through a pipe.

Two hours later, when shadows were halfway up the opposite slope of the valley and I was emerging from the forest on to the mountain shoulder, I again heard a droning mechanical noise. Soon I found the machine, an aeroplane, far below in the blue shadows of the valley’s trough; it was turning and climbing, higher still, till it had cleared the shadow and was flashing orange in the evening light. Higher again; now it was circling the Charmoz aiguilles, looking down on the point of the Grepon itself, and now in a minute the creature had careened across the enormous gulf of air to the towers of the Grandes Forasses. A moment later, the airman must be looking down into Italy. And then, with a glint on his wings, he turns, makes a bee line for Mont Blanc, serenely clears its fifteen thousand feet with a few thousands to spare, and so dwindles to a speck and vanishes in the glowing sky towards Geneva.

I met a Frenchman watching his flight through a telescope. “I wonder why he’s out so late,” I said. The Frenchman, who had often watched him dropping supplies on Mont Blanc for the Observatory, answered: “0, il prend son aperitif.”

Guardian Country diary, 25 September 1926.