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cutting the sky at more than nineteen thousand feet. Cayambe and Antisana were almost as high.
    ‘We’ll slip through a pass,’ Terry assured Hal.
    ‘But why are you going north now?’
    ‘Just thought you’d like to have a look at the equator. And there it is. See that monument? It was put there in 1936 by a French survey mission to mark the exact equatorial line so that they could figure out the precise dimensions of this old planet. And now we’re in the northern hemisphere.’ He banked the plane and sped back over the monument. At one instant they were in the northern hemisphere, at the next in the southern.
    Roger was blowing on his chilled hands. ‘Pretty frosty equator,’ he commented.
    ‘Is that road beneath us the Pan-American Highway?’ asked John Hunt.
    ‘Right,’ said Terry.
    There it was, the wonder road, that had now been practically completed all the way from Alaska to Patagonia.
    ‘I’m going to make that trip sometime,’ vowed Roger.
    ‘A good many people are making it right now,’ Terry said. ‘Yesterday I met a Scotsman who has a sheep ranch away down near Cape Horn. He had driven up all the way to Chicago, and was on his way back.’
    ‘But how about those breaks in the road?’
    There are three breaks in Central America. But you can put your car on a train or ship and get around them.’
    The world’s longest road,’ said John Hunt, looking down at the magic ribbon. ‘It will do a lot to tie the Americas together.’
    ‘But not so much as the aeroplane,’ said Terry, fondling the controls. For five years the flying Irishman had had his own plane. He had paid for it twice over by carrying passengers between Quito and Guayaquil on the coast, and Quito over the Andes to the jungle posts where rubber and quinine were gathered.
    Hal wondered that he had never had an accident — and, as they raced towards the forbidding wall of rock and snow, hoped that he would not break his record now.
    Presently the rampart ahead seemed to dissolve and a pass was visible. But what a pass! Great precipices frowned on either side of it. Couldn’t the plane go higher and clear all this danger? Hal looked at the altimeter. It registered almost seventeen thousand feet. That meant that they were jammed up against the ceiling.
    Suddenly even the ceiling failed them. The needle on the altimeter began to spin.
    ‘Hey! That won’t do,’ exclaimed Terry, trying to nose up the dropping plane.
    They got out of the dangerous downdraught, but it left them only six hundred feet above the rocky bottom of the pass. In vain Terry tried to bring the plane up. So much banking and wheeling was necessary to avoid the cliffs that the little plane had no energy left for climbing. There was nothing to do but to follow all the twists and turns of the canyon and trust to luck that there would not be another downdraught. S turns and angles continually appeared ahead. Nobody was studying a map now. Roger’s eyes popped as crag after crag rushed up to the windows and skimmed by with little to spare.
    But a polo player would have been proud to manage his horse as Terry rode his plane. Hal thought of Ben Hur and his chariot race. Terry did not look like Ben Hur and he was not standing on a careering chariot but sitting quietly in the pilot’s seat. But there was something of the heroic of all ages in the way he steered his irresistible motor around immovable objects. They melted away at his command. The impossible became possible.
    Now, thank heaven, the floor of the canyon was falling a little. The savage walls were dropping back, beaten. With a final triumphant burst of speed the Bonanza swept out into a new world.
    Gone were the arid, sandy wastes of the Pacific coast where rain almost never falls. Below stretched brilliant green forests that never lacked for water. Winding streams made silver alleys through the green.
    ‘Look at the pink cloud,’ exclaimed Roger, hardly believing his own eyes.
    Sure enough, a coloured