On Feb. 28, it was so hot in Bulawayo (South Eastern Africa) that the monkeys were sitting almost motionless on the lower branches of the trees. The air was as thick as chicken gumbo. Suddenly, the animals and the natives were disturbed by a noise like nothing they had ever heard before. An airplane shot down from the sky and came to an abrupt stop in the tangled grasses of a clearing near the village. A woman stepped out unsteadily and fainted. Two natives picked her up and carried her into Bulawayo, where they gave her some sour milk. She developed a fever, and said her name was Lady Heath. That did not mean much to the natives, who wondered what business a lady could have between the tip of South Africa and the equator in an airplane painted turquoise blue. Nearly a month later, the fever left her and she left Bulawayo, flying North.
Behind the flight of Lady Sophie Heath there was jealousy and good British gold—the gold that comes from coal and iron mines which husbands own. Her new husband, Sir James Heath, is 76. She is pretty and 30 and got for her wedding present from him a turquoise blue plane to match her favorite stone.
The day before their marriage, last October, she had taken the plane up above London to establish an altitude record of 19,000 feet. A few weeks later, she had kissed Sir James goodbye, embarked for Cape Town, South Africa, whence she quickly began to fly across all Africa toward London. If she succeeded, a new female flight record would be hers, but a rival, an "other woman" loomed.
The other woman was Lady Mary Bailey. She, too, was an aviatrix and the not quite so young wife (38) of a richer but not quite so old baronet, Sir Abe Bailey, 63. The gold of Sir Abe came from diamond mines and from other oldtime South African transactions which gained for him the dubious title of "one of Cecil Rhodes' young men." Lady Mary had given him five children and he had supplied a town house in London, a country place in Suffolk, a 200,000-acre ranch in Rhodesia, and plenty of airplanes.
No sooner did Lady Mary hear that Lady Sophie had recovered from the fever, and was really about to resume the Cape Town-London flight, than she called for her latest and staunchest Moth, and hopped over the British channel. But she had no wish to flaunt a rivalry. Therefore, since her diamond-mining husband, Sir Abe, happened to be in South Africa, she announced that she was taking the most leisurely trip to visit him and that quite incidentally she would be the first woman to fly the London-Cape Town wastes.