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'Last night was last night,' I told him. 'Today's something else again. Do we fly up to Landro this afternoon?'

He stared at me, a slight frown on his face, seemed about to make some sort of comment, then obviously changed his mind.

'We ought to,' he said. 'There's the fortnightly run to the mission station at Santa Helena, to make tomorrow. There's only one thing. The Bristol ought to go, too. I want Mannie to check that engine out as soon as possible. That means both of us will have to fly. Do you feel up to it?'

'That's what I'm getting paid for,' I said and shuffled down the steps towards the cab waiting at the bottom.

*

The airstrip Hannah was using at Manaus at that time wasn't much. A wooden administration hut with a small tower and a row of decrepit hangar sheds backed on to the river, roofed with rusting corrugated iron. It was a derelict sort of place and the Hayley, the only aircraft on view, looked strangely out of place, its scarlet and silver trim gleaming in the afternoon sun.

It was siesta so there was no one around. I dropped my canvas grip on the ground beside the Hayley. It was so hot that I took off my flying jacket - and very still except for an occasional roar from a bull-throated howler monkey in the trees at the river's edge.

There was a sudden rumble behind and when I turned, Hannah was pushing back the sliding door on one of the sheds.

'Well, here she is,' he said.

*

The Bristol fighter was one of the really great combat aircraft of the war and it served overseas with the R.A.F. until well into the thirties. As I've said, there were still one or two around on odd stations in England when I was learning to fly and I'd had seven or eight hours in them.

But this one was an original - a veritable museum piece. She had a fuselage which had been patched so many times it was ridiculous and in one place, it was still possible to detect the faded rondel of the R.A.F.

Before I could make any kind of comment, Hannah said, 'Don't be put off by the state of the fuselage. She's a lot better than she looks. Structurally as sound as a bell and I don't think there's much wrong with the engine. The guy I bought it from had her for fifteen years and didn't use her all that much. God knows what her history was before that. The log book's missing.'

'Have you flown her much?' I asked.

'Just over a hundred miles. She handled well. Didn't give me any kind of trouble at all.'

The Bristol was a two-seater. I climbed up on the lower port wing and peered into the pilot's cockpit. It had exactly the right kind of smell - a compound of leather, oil and petrol - something that had never yet failed to excite me and I reached out to touch the stick in a kind of reluctant admiration. The only modern addition was a radio which must have been fitted when the new law made them mandatory in Brazil.

'It really must be an original. Basket seat and leather cushions. All the comforts of home.'

'They were a great plane,' Hannah said soberly.

I dropped to the ground. 'Didn't I read somewhere that van Richthofen shot down four in one day?'

'There were reasons for that. The pilot had a fixed machine-gun up front - a Vickers. The observer usually carried one or two free-mounting Lewis guns in the rear. At first, they used the usual two-seater technique.'

'Which meant the man in the rear cockpit did all the shooting?'

'Exactly, and that was no good. They sustained pretty heavy losses at first until pilots discovered she was so manoeuvrable you could fly her like a single-seater.'

'With the fixed machine-gun as the main weapon?'

'That's right. The observer's Lewis just became a useful extra. They used to carry a couple of bombs. Not much - around two hundred and forty pounds - but it means you can take a reasonable pay load. If you look, you'll see the rear cockpit has been extended at some time.'

I peered over. 'You could get a couple of passengers in there now.'

'I suppose so, but it isn't necessary. The Hayley can handle that end of things. Let's get her outside.'

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