Text 1: Above the valley, by Eleanor Price

An original contemporary travel feature.

The cable car leaves the station so quietly that I do not realise it has started until the platform begins to slide away. I hold the metal bar with both hands. The new line is carrying its first group of public passengers today, and the operator has just reminded us that the emergency instructions are printed beside the door.

Below us, the valley narrows between dark slopes. I tell myself that the cabin is secure, but I keep looking at the join between the doors and the floor. The cable gives a faint hum. Each time the cabin passes a support tower, there is a brief clatter and a small movement that I feel in my knees.

After the third tower, I notice the river rather than the height. It bends around a stand of trees, then disappears beneath a road bridge. I loosen one hand from the bar. The cabin continues at the same measured pace, and I begin to understand why people might choose this route for the view.

Near the far station, the operator points to a second cable running above us. It is part of the system that would bring the cabin in if the main line stopped, she explains. I find this reassuring, though I cannot stop thinking about how much I still have to take on trust.

When the doors open, I step out without the careful pause I had planned. I would take the cable car again, especially on a clear day. I still would not want to be the person responsible for keeping it moving.

Text 2: The air beneath us, by Walter Finch

An original magazine article written in an early twentieth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

This article was written in 1912, when very few people had flown in an aeroplane.

My neighbour, Mr Bell, had invited me to join him in his aeroplane for a short flight over the fields. I accepted with the confidence of a man who had never been above the roofs of his own town. At the flying ground, the machine looked less like a means of travel than a collection of spars and fabric that had agreed, for the moment, to remain together.

Bell climbed in first and showed me where to sit. The engine began its hard, uneven noise, and I found that my reply to his cheerful remarks came out as a nod. When the wheels left the grass, the ground seemed to fall away rather than recede. I gripped the side of the seat and watched the fences become thin lines.

We circled the fields. The noise did not soften, but the view grew orderly: lanes met at right angles, and the river made a bright curve between them. I stopped looking for the ground immediately beneath us. Bell pointed towards the town, and I managed a wave to the people gathered by the flying ground.

On landing, the wheels struck the turf with a jolt that made my teeth meet. Bell called it a good flight. I agreed, and meant it. I had seen the countryside as I could not have seen it from a road, and I was already asking when we might go up again.

Even so, when Bell offered me the passenger seat beside him on the next flight, I asked whether I might wait until he had made one more landing. The fields looked peaceful from above; the machine, at ground level, still seemed to have a great deal to prove.