AERONAUTICS: Paris to Persia

A flying speck vanished away from the aerodrome at Le Bourget, outside Paris. They saw it pass near Strasbourg. Austrians and Hungarians glanced aloft shortly after. Dour Serbs eyed its flight over their dark mountains. Quarrelsome Bulgars and the night-watchmen of Constantinople heard its thin droning and all night it sped on over Anatolia, Kurdistan, down the Euphrates Valley to meet the dawn. At Basra in Irak, where the Euphrates, led by the Tigris, floods down to the Persian Gulf and men are said to have flown on magic carpets, the speck...

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