The Biological Adventure Clock

Among my guy friends, we joke that a man’s “biological clock” has to do with getting killed in action or dying in adventure. “So-and-so’s biological clock is ticking; he’s just got to die soon—somewhere in Africa.” Only a hundred years ago, there was still room for explorers to push the boundaries of the uncharted: the untamed sky, land, and sea. Today, the GPS robs us of so much fun. The unknown is at an all-time level of scarcity. Safety, better equipment, and the fact that everything has already been done makes adventuring rather hard.

But a hundred years ago, great men roamed the earth. One of these was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a pioneering pilot, writer, and poetic philosopher. I’ve just been reading his autobiography, Wind, Sand and Stars. It is eloquent, exciting, and mystical, and I highly recommend it for summer reading.

Perhaps best known for his whimsical novelette The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry entered adulthood as the only male of an impoverished aristocratic family. Qualifying as a military pilot in 1922, he became one of an intrepid band of pioneering pilots, establishing airmail routes over the Mediterranean to French colonies in northwest Africa, then over the South Atlantic, and even over South America.

In planes more primitive than today’s stick-shift cars, Saint-Exupéry flew thousands of miles without radar, GPS, or any sort of digital calculating systems. 

What did they have? Maps, compasses, and various “celestial” navigation tools such as the sextant. With a sextant, the angles between the horizon and a star or other heavenly body can be measured using a system of movable mirrors. When the angle is ascertained, a calculation reveals that it is only possible for them to be at that angle at this particular time if you are in a particular latitude or longitude. Doing this twice, in different directions, results in being able to calculate both latitude and longitude—and thus pinpoint your location.

One of Saint-Exupéry’s primary routes was between Toulouse and Dakar. That is over 2,200 miles. He also served as the airline stopover manager for the Cape Juby airfield in the Spanish zone of South Morocco, in the Sahara. His duties included negotiating the safe release of downed fliers taken hostage by Saharan tribes. This perilous task earned him his first Legion of Honor Award from the French Government. He writes:

As early as the year 1926 I was transferred out of Europe to the Dakar-Juby division, where the Sahara meets the Atlantic and where, only recently, the Arabs had murdered two of our pilots, Erable and Gourp. In those days our planes frequently fell apart in mid-air, and because of this the African divisions were always flown by two ships, one without the mails trailing and convoying the other, prepared to take over the sacks in the event the mail plane broke down.

As another pilot took him in the empty convoy plane to Dakar, Saint-Exupéry fell asleep. He was awakened by a crash and “Damn! There goes a connecting rod!” The plane glided to a crash landing; they “lost both wheels against one sand-dune, a wing against another, and crashed with a sudden jerk into a third.” They were unhurt. The primary, mail-carrying plane landed safely nearby, but because of the extra weight of the mail it was carrying, it could only take one of them onboard. Saint-Exupéry would have to spend the night in the desert until they were able to return for him the following day. 

This was his first day in Africa. Although they were in a safe (i.e., successfully colonized) area, his fellow pilots did not tell him that. Instead, they instructed him to shoot “anything and everything you see.” Besides spotting a gazelle (which he did not shoot), Saint-Exupéry spent an uneventful night and was “rescued” the next day. Uneventful, that is, except for the fact that he fell in love with the desert: 

This sea of sand bowled me over. Unquestionably it was filled with mystery and with danger. The silence that reigned over it was not the silence of emptiness but of plotting, of imminent enterprise…. Something half revealed yet wholly unknown had bewitched me. The love of the Sahara, like love itself, is born of a face perceived and never really seen.

In another passage, he describes a “minor accident” which forced him to land on a giant tableland in the Sahara of Spanish Africa. “Without question, I was the first human being ever to wander over this…its sides were remarkably steep, no Arab could have climbed them, and no European has yet ventured into this wild region.” Darkness gathered, and in the plain sand of the plateau he discovered what could only be meteorites: “A sheet spread beneath the stars can receive only star-dust. Never had a stone fallen from the skies made known its origin so unmistakably.” “Since never from the beginning of time had anything been present to displace them,” he discovered about one meteorite per acre. He was high on the wilderness.

On December 30, 1935, Saint-Exupéry was flying a Caudron Simoun C.630, one of the airmail planes he flew most consistently. The Caudron Simoun C.630 was 28 feet long, with a 34-foot wingspan and an empty weight of 1,885 pounds. The six-cylinder air-cooled engine produced a maximum of 220 horsepower, resulting in a cruising speed of 170 mph and a maximum speed of only 190 mph. For comparison, most of today’s SUVs have a more powerful engine than that. 

He was attempting a record-breaking Paris to Saigon route. Having taken off from the leg starting in Benghazi, in Libya, he was expecting to see the lights of the Nile valley. He ran into night-time cloud cover. Trying to glimpse landmarks in the dark, through increasingly thick cloud-cover, Saint-Exupéry was unsure of their position. He became completely disoriented. 

Descending, trying to get below the cloud cover, he saw his altimeter read 1,200 feet, but he knew the atmospheric pressure could be causing inaccurate readings. Suddenly, at 170 miles an hour, they crashed into a barren plateau near the Wadi Natrun valley. “I am quite sure that in the split second that followed, all I expected was the great flash of ruddy light of the explosion in which Prevot [his mechanic] and I were to be blown up together…” But that did not happen. “Instead there was a sort of earth-quake that splintered our cabin, ripped away the windows, blew sheets of metal hurtling through space a hundred yards away, and filled our very entrails with its roar.”

The ensuing days of thirst, in which he and Prevot walked 150 miles in the desert without water or food—and were rescued only hours before dying of dehydration—well, you’ll have to read the book yourself for that. And I won’t spoil his account of the Spanish Revolution either…or of the reduced slave’s largesse. 

Saint-Exupéry was a man who followed the ticking of his biological adventure clock. Too bad the clock caught up with him in the ’40s, when he disappeared off the coast of France while flying a reconnaissance mission in World War II. Say what you will about it, his passion for adventure is noble, and it is the source for some of the most beautiful and contemplative prose I have read all year. There was nothing little about his large-souled and royal adventuring; he was a prince of the air.