22, June 1997

Hang Glider

“Daddy, what’s that for? Lelia asked inquisitively.

Lelia’s father was standing besides a hang glider, spread out on the ground, tying sandbags to his belt.

“The other people fly without bags, I’ve seen them!”

“Other people do, but I can’t” her father replied calmly. “I’m not heavy enough.”

“But in the air, the lighter the better.”

“Look over there! See how that maple leaf is turning in the air. That’s because it’s light. If I start turning somersaults in the air, can you imagine what would happen? This hang glider is for people who weigh from seventy to ninety kilograms. I barely weigh sixty.”

Lelia walked round the hang glider. It looked like a bit nylon headscarf stretched over a metal frame. Under the scarf another, triangular, frame was fixed. There was no engine and no steering wheel. So simple, but how well it flew!

“Daddy, are there hang gliders for children?”

“There are for older children, but not for children like you. And there won’t be.”

“Why not?” Lelia said disappointedly.

“When you fly, you steer the hang glider only with your body and your muscles. It’s very hard.”

Lelia examined her father. He certainly had big, bulging muscles!

Then she clenched her fists and tensed her muscles, but no bulging muscles appeared. No, she wasn’t strong enough to become a hang glider yet. But...

“Daddy, how much do I weigh?” Asked Lelia, and held her breath with excitement.

“Well, you’ve got my build, my little chick, and I should say you weigh about thirty kilograms, or maybe.....”

Before her father had time to finish Lelia clapped her hands in delight.

“That means you can take me instead of your sandbags! Your sixty kilograms and my thirty make up just the ninety we need.”

“What do you mean I’ll take you?” Her father said in surprise.

“You’ll put me on your shoulders and off we’ll fly together.”

“Oh, no. Just put that idea right out of your head,” said her father, getting alarmed.

Lelia grew sad. Couldn’t her daddy see how much she wanted to fly?

It was fine weather and every day hang gliders would soar off up into the sky. Lelia would run after her daddy’s hang glider, her mummy’s and after the other people’s. But they would all break away from the ground, while Lelia would run to the edge of the hill and stop, for she had no wings to fly.

Lelia’s mummy, who after each flight would say how marvellous it was to soar about in the air, as soon as Lelia mentioned flying, immediately shook her head and said, “Oh no! Goodness me, no!” But then, evidently, she remembered how hurt she had been when, even as an adult, she had not been allowed to hang glide for a long time, and had been told that it was not a sport for women.

She saw that Lelia’s desire to fly did not pass. And so she finally gave in. One fine day she sewed a special little apron to fit her daughter with straps and a clip that would fasten to the ring in the centre of the hang glider before their flight. Lelia even grew subdued, afraid her dream might not come true.

That evening Lelia and her father made a few trial runs to see how they would feel in the air. Then they tried running off a small hummock and flying first three and then five metres. They were in the air only for a few seconds, but what fun it was!

The next day they trained again. And the following day too.

Then, at last the big day came.

They climbed up the hill early in the morning. There was a smell of wormwood, and their feet slipped on the bouncy grass, already dried out by the sun. Lelia puffed and panted as she climbed but when she reached the top and looked down, her heart started beating fast. Fear was slowly rising inside her.

Then Lelia looked up at the sky. It was clear and blue with only one little cloud in sight. No doubt she and her father would soon be soaring about near that cloud, or maybe a little below it. All they had to do was to fly off towards it. Taking off was the hardest part.

The hill on which they were standing bent round in the shape of a huge horseshoe. “If it were put on a horse’s hoof,” Lelia thought, for some reason, “the horse would have to be about twenty kilometres high, if not more. If a horse like that neighed, it would sound like thunder.” Lelia thought that was funny and her fear disappeared.

The air in the middle of the horseshoe-shaped hill would help them to take off, because it was always rising. Her father was always saying there were constant rising currents here.

Lelia’s father glanced at her.

“Well, are you scared?”

If he had asked her a little earlier, she would not have known what to say. But now she firmly replied:

“Not at all. Let’s go.”

The little girl put her arms round her father’s neck. Her heart missed a beat. Was she scared again? Maybe. But had her mother tried to pull her down to the ground, it would have been no good; Lelia was holding on very tightly.

“You’ll throttle me,” her father laughed. “Hold onto my straps instead.”

The hand glider was raised. Lelia’s mummy clipped the apron straps on to the glider. She pulled them to test their strength. Then she attached Lelia’s apron to her husband’s belt, since, after all, she was flying instead of sandbags.

“Well, here we go!” Said Lelia’s father.

“Off you go!” Her mummy replied in a rather strange voice, and looked at her with a mixture of happiness and anxiety. If only she could fly with them and hold on tightly to Lelia herself!

Her father ran headlong down the steep slope. Lelia caught her breath.Oh, Mummy, what’s going to happen!” She involuntarily screwed up her eyes and her hand gripped the straps till they hurt.

Her father jerked away from the ground and, spreading his arms and legs, he stretched straight out. Lelia clung to him, unable to work out whether they were flying or falling. The wind hit her full in the face and pulled at her hair. She half opened her eyes and saw that they were still flying downwards. That meant they were gathering the necessary speed to fly.

Just then the hang glider levelled out and began, so it seemed to Lelia, to rise. “It’s like sledging,” she thought happily, “you speed down one hill and keep going up the next hill.”

“Are you all right up there?” Her father asked.

“Yes!” breathed Lelia.

She was no longer screwing up her eyes, but was looking around with them wide open. Her father moved the frame to the right and his body to the left. Lelia repeated his movement and the hang glider slowly began to turn. Lelia spotted her mummy down on the ground. Her head was thrown back and she was waving her outstretched arm. The other people on the hill were also waving.

She and her father were like birds. A huge expanse opened in front of them.

They could see so much all at once: the houses of their town, the cars on the road, tufty, little islands of trees and even the distant mountains.

They soared about, cutting the air with their wing. The apron which Lelia’s mummy had sewn, supported her well from below, just like a little hammock.

The little cloud floating in the sky was evidently, like Mummy, a little afraid for Lelia, and stretched out towards her. But what was there to be afraid of. Lelia was having such a wonderful time.

(Courtesy Misha)

Mysteries of the moon

On a fine summer night when there’s a full moon, walk outside and look up at the sky. Stars and more stars! And among them hangs the big, beautiful, yellow moon. For thousands of years people have been observing the moon, making up legends and stories about it. It appeared to be strange and mysterious. Sometimes it was round like a pancake and other times, as narrow as a small sickle.

It turned out that this happens because the moon, which is a sphere like our planet, only much smaller, revolves around the earth. The entire surface of the moon is covered with dark and light spots. At least that’s how it appears to us on earth.

In fact, these are mountain chains, craters and vast plains. It was once thought that these plains held water, and they were therefore called seas and lakes: Sea of Tranquility, Sea of Cold, Sea of Dream. Sounds fine, doesn’t it? It was later learnt that the lunar “seas” were drier than any desert.

How man has dreamed of reaching the moon! And he did so. Automatic interplanetary stations have landed on the moon, photographed its opposite side and taken samples of lunar soil. The Soviet Lunokhod-1 measured the distance between the earth and moon to the nearest fraction of a metre. In 1969 American astronauts landed on the lunar surface. It isn’t easy to live on the moon. We already know there is no water there. And there’s nothing to breathe either - no air. And if there’s no air, there’s no wind, no dawn, rainbow or blue sky.

The scenery, we must admit, is not too cheerful. But then in the black lunar sky you can always see the sun and stars. The moon’s force of gravity is six times less than the earth’s. So things are lighter there. If you weigh 30 kilograms, for instance, on the moon you would weigh only five.

Imagine how high you could jump! One hop and you could break all the Olympic records in the world. The earth exerts a force on the moon that prevents it from flying off into outer space. And the earth also feels the force of lunar gravity. For example, thanks to the moon, the water level in the seas and oceans rises and falls twice a day, with the highest tides occurring when there’s a full moon.

The moon greatly influences man, too. After all, water accounts for about two-thirds of our bodies’ mass, and the moon works its tidal influence on these little “seas” as well. Indian scientists believe that a person is easily excitable and absent-minded in the extreme when there is a full moon.

So if you have to write an exercise at that time, be especially careful. In the future the moon will serve as a transfer station for interplanetary space ships. And there will come the time when we’ll go to the moon to spend our vacations.

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