4604. He considered that the engine was new and so perhaps it was faulty. Thus he reasoned to himself, as the dark spot got very slightly bigger. He began to be certain that he was going to die when the wing melted and fell from the plane. He could see this happening in his mind eye. 4605. Oddly enough, the prospect of the plane tearing apart as the wing fell away did not cause his any fear. The reality of his impending death produced a philosophic mood. He was thinking about how the plane looked to him to be entirely still, and not moving at all. 4606. He knew that the aircraft at that moment was moving through the air at five hundred miles an hour. Five hundred seemed like such a strange speed that he could not grasp it. Fifty miles an hour he could picture, but five hundred he could not. 4607. "I wonder how fast the earth is moving as it spins around on its axis?" he asked himself, but he had no idea. "How fast is the spinning earth moving in its path around the sun." Could it be fifty miles an hour or five hundred, he couldn't even guess.