She decided she had to make an attempt at reaching a village or the motor track. It was suicide to stay near the ship. Unless an aircraft flew directly overhead, the Fairchild could not be seen. Still shaky, she stretched out under the shade of the plane and resigned herself to her predicament.

Kitty was soon to discover the incredible contrast of temperatures in the Sahara. During the day, the air climbed to 120 degrees F (49 degrees C) and dropped to 39 degrees F (4 degrees C) at night. The agonizing cold of the night was as torturous as the daytime heat. After suffering twelve hours of burning sun, she scrapped out a burrow in the sand and crawled into it. Then she huddled in a ball, shivering and sleeping fitfully until dawn.

In the early morning of the second day, before the sun began to beat down, she felt strong enough to launch her preparations to abandon the airplane. She fashioned herself a crutch from a wing strut and made a crude umbrella from the wing fabric. Using a small set of tools, she removed the compass from the instrument panel. Despite her injuries, Kitty was determined to strike out for the motor track. She felt she had no alternative.

Feeling better now for having a plan, Kitty took her logbook and began writing the first page of what was to be the account of her perseverance and heroic attempt to survive under the worst conditions imaginable. She opened the entry by describing the crash and sketching her intended trek south down the billabong until she found an easy climb to the rim. Once in the open, she planned to head due east until she picked up the motor track or ran across a tribe of wandering nomads. Then she tore out the page and attached it to the instrument panel so that rescuers could follow her trail in the unlikely event the plane was discovered first.

The heat was rapidly becoming unbearable. Her situation was made even worse by the walls of the gully that reflected and magnified the sun’s rays like an open crematorium. She found it difficult to breathe and had to fight off a terrible urge to drink her precious water in large swallows.

One last act before she set out. She unlaced the boot on her fractured ankle and tenderly removed it. The pain forced a soft groan from her lips, and she let it ease before binding the ankle in her silk flying scarf Then with the compass and canteen attached to her belt, the umbrella held high, and the crutch snug under one arm, Kitty set out under the onslaught of the Sahara sun, limping gamely across the sand of the ancient riverbed.

The search for Kitty Mannock continued off and on over the years, but neither she nor her plane were ever sighted. No clue turned up, no camel caravan came across a skeleton in the desert that was dressed in the old-fashioned flying togs of the thirties, no wandering nomad stumbled on the wrecked airplane. Kitty’s total disappearance became one of the great mysteries of aviation.