Air is so bound up with man’s life that only with difficulty can he realize its existence as something in itself. To a savage it is as much an abstraction as consciousness; a child can conceive wind, which is air in motion, but not air itself. In our own language, wind, mist, and rain are ancient words, but air is a late and learned borrowing of a Greek word, which itself originally meant wind.

In his pre-natal months, indeed, man is aquatic. But thrust forth into the atmosphere—small and red—he sucks in a first breath spasmodically, and owes his allegiance to air. Seventy years later, a nurse stands by an old man’s bed, waiting for what is known as “the last breath.”

Even among the so-called land-animals, man is less than most bound to the earth. His tree-dwelling ancestors may have descended to the ground furtively, as to a foreign and hostile region; in civilization people spend most of their time upon raised platforms called floors.

As individual men move in a too well-known landscape without noticing its features, so man—fallaciously—takes for granted the all-pervasive air. His historians deal in lands and seas. But most movements of peoples have been not so much quests for better countries as for better atmospheric conditions. “A place in the sun” explains much of history more exactly than we usually realize, except that just as often we should say, “A place in the rain.” A thunderstorm in hay-time may overthrow a ministry, and a slight average rise or fall of temperature may topple a throne; a shift in the storm-track can ruin an empire. In the twentieth century a temporary variation of rainfall put Okies upon the highway by the hundred-thousand, just as in the third century a similar shift might in a single year hurl the Huns against the Chinese frontier and set the blue-painted Caledonians swarming at Hadrian’s Wall. In the mass as in the individual, man is less a land-animal than a creature of the air.

2

At five minutes to four on January mornings there was never any sign of dawn. Few buildings showed lights, and the Chief, still sleepy, felt himself steering from street-lamp to street-lamp like the captain of a coastwise steamer laying his course from one lighthouse to the next. An occasional truck passed by, showing that even at that hour the city did not entirely give over activity.

One advantage of getting to work so early was that at least you had no parking troubles. As he walked across to Tom’s All-Night Coffee Shop, he took a professional survey of weather conditions. No moon, stars bright everywhere, cloudless; fresh breeze from the northwest; temperature safely above frost; a typical winter morning for San Francisco.

“Fair and warmer,” said Tom.

“If it doesn’t rain,” replied the Chief, completing the formula begun so many years back that they had forgotten the original joke.

“Orange juice, coffee, snail.”