I guess the first part of it depicts him as a young man, attempting his first proper pilot's job as a carrier of airmail from Toulouse to Senegal, in awe of the pilots who flew before him. A second part explains something of the airmail routes in the Andes. Part of this is the story of a pilot, Henri Guillaumet, whose airplane is trapped in the Andes. Despite the deadly frost, the inimical terrain and lacking food, he walks for days and manages to make his way to his family and his fellow pilots, although he had to be hospitalized. A third part is about Mohammed Ben Lhaoussin: a man who, after being captured and then enslaved in the Sahara desert, is freed and flown back to his native Morocco by Saint-Éxupéry and his French compatriots. (I found the depiction of slavery and its emotional/mental effects rather disquieting.)
Perhaps I am misremembering bits — if so, I'm sorry.
Later, Saint-Éxupéry narrates a hairsbreadth brush with death that he faced alongside the mechanic André Prévot in the 1930s. They crash in their plane in the eastern Sahara, vaguely between Libya and the Red Sea. In the crash, the water reservoirs are damaged and the liquid spills into the sand. The two men nearly die of thirst. They walk hundreds of kilometers trying to reach the sea, an oasis, or anything, but along the way fata morganas mislead them much as Saint-Éxupéry was misled by stars that he thought might be lighthouses in an earlier story.
Terre des hommes, and this tale in particular, is written so well that I felt sympathetically thirsty as the tale progressed. The grimness was veiled, too, in elegant prose-poetry and an impressive philosophical — not quite detachment, but at least analysis. But despite the muting elements, the adventure was so gripping that I kept thinking of the tale again during the working day. In general, Terre des hommes is one of the books where I figuratively hop up and down with admiring enthusiasm, although it's silly to think of that when the topic is so grim.
***
Recently I have thought about generating beautiful things from a personal hell or the darkness of the grave. Is it possible to beautify the world by reappropriating elements of bad experiences?°
A bush or a fruit tree or another plant takes food from the rotten plant matter in the worm-eaten soil, or from lifeless-looking bulbs. It works this food into petals that appear, beautifully, to the rest of the world. (Apologies for the time-worn metaphor.) But I don't know if it's this easy for humans.
I thought of this because of the saint's legend of St. Dorothea of Caesarea:
Dorothea of Caesarea suffered during the persecution of Diocletian, 6 February, 311, at Caesarea in Cappadocia. She was brought before the prefect Sapricius, tried, tortured, and sentenced to death. On her way to the place of execution the pagan lawyer Theophilus said to her in mockery: "Bride of Christ, send me some fruits from your bridegroom's garden." Before she was executed, she sent him, by a six-year-old boy, her headdress which was found to be filled with a heavenly fragrance of roses and fruits. Theophilus at once confessed himself a Christian, was put on the rack, and suffered death.[I am not quite sure whether this fragrance of roses and fruits is a saint's way of saying 'I told you so,' or if Dorothea's gesture was intended to be more high-mindedly generous. Generally, it's likely best if generous deeds don't end in people being 'put on the rack' and 'suffering death.']
[Wikipedia]
[° It turns out that Saint-Éxupéry was writing about a similar line of thought just where I'd left off reading, so these ruminations are even less half-original than I'd imagined...]
*
Returning to Terre des hommes, I think that Saint-Éxupéry must have worked over his experience for years. I have crises over writing about simple grocery shopping trips; it's mind-boggling to think of the work he put into his descriptions of thirst, abandonment, and triumphant return to the comforts of human society.
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