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With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D. Summary
With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D. by Rudyard Kipling is a science fiction novella first published in 1905. Set in the year 2000, it envisions a future dominated by advanced airship travel, focusing on a transatlantic mail delivery voyage that highlights the intricacies of aerial navigation and the societal structures supporting it.
With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D. Excerpt
Short Summary: In this speculative tale set in the year 2000, Kipling imagines a world where airships dominate global travel. The story follows a mail flight from London to Quebec, offering detailed insights into the challenges and routines of aerial navigation in this envisioned future.
Excerpt:
At nine o'clock of a gusty winter night, I stood on the lower stages of one of the G.P.O. outward mail towers. My purpose was a run to Quebec in 'Postal Packet 162 or such other as may be appointed'; and the Postmaster-General himself countersigned the order. This talisman opened all doors, even those in the despatching-caisson at the foot of the tower, where they were delivering the sorted Continental mail. The bags lay packed close as herrings in the long grey underbodies which our G.P.O. still calls 'coaches.' Five such coaches were filled as I watched, and were shot up the guides to be locked on to their waiting packets three hundred feet nearer the stars.
From the despatching-caisson, I was conducted by a courteous and wonderfully learned official—Mr. L. L. Geary, Second Despatcher of the Western Route—to the Captains' Room (this wakes an echo of old romance), where the mail captains come on for their turn of duty. He introduces me to the captain of '162'—Captain Purnall, and his relief, Captain Hodgson. The one is small and dark; the other large and red; but each has the brooding sheathed glance characteristic of eagles and aeronauts. You can see it in the pictures of our racing professionals, from L. V. Rautsch to little Ada Warrleigh—that fathomless abstraction of eyes habitually turned through naked space.
On the notice-board in the Captains' Room, the pulsing arrows of some twenty indicators register, degree by geographical degree, the progress of as many homeward-bound packets. The word 'Cape' rises across the face of a dial; a gong strikes: the South African mid-weekly mail is in at the Highgate Receiving Towers. That is all.
We discuss the weather with special reference to the North Atlantic as we would at an ordinary club. The talk is diversified with illustrations from personal experience. I observe with astonishment, not for the first time, how the atmosphere of the upper air seems to breed a peculiar kind of anecdote. It must be because the life, with its infinite chances, develops the higher imaginative faculties. One tells a tale of the bad old days of the eighties or nineties, when the only communication with America was by submarine grapples or 'wireless' as they called it. Another, that was before his time, but he had it from his father, launches on the history of the first transatlantic airship—the 'Agatha'—disastrously wrecked off the Fastnet. A third begins an anecdote about the building of the 'Lucania,' the first of the 28,000-ton liners, and so on.
Then the gong in the corner beats twice. That means 'Stand by!' We are about to start. The captains go to their packets. I find my way to '162' through a maze of corridors, and enter by the underbody. She is a little ship, and the gas is whistling joyously in her cells as she sways at her mooring-post. Captain Purnall follows me, and we clamber up the ladder to the control-platform. We are barely in our seats when a bell rings in the engine-room, and the engineer reports all ready. Another bell, and the mooring-post drops. A third bell, and the engines give one deep sob. We are off!
