Denis Weldone walked into the lobby of the Majestic Hotel, one of the better hotels in this provincial Argentinean town in the foothills of the Andes. He went straight up the stairs to the room where Adrienne Bolland was staying.
Adrienne Bolland was a stubborn young women with a all-consuming passion for flying which had brought her to the Andes with the intention of being the first women to fly over the Cordillera mountain range into Chile. Against all rime and reason, she was planning this epic flight for the following day in a Caudron G3 aeroplane which, under normal circumstances, could not even fly to 3000 metres, and surely not the 4300 metres of the Las Cuevas summit which she could just glimpse out of her window.
There was a knock at the door, she was upset as she wanted to be left alone. Adrienne opened the door angrily to see a young teenage girl - somehow her anger disappeared. Denis had chosen this girl not only for her gift as a medium but for her innocent beauty, it was hard to refuse her request to enter the room.
“I have come with an important message for you, Mademoiselle”, Adrienne was surprised to hear such perfect French although the accent and intonation sounded strangely old-fashioned.
Adrienne lit a cigarette and replied “I don’t have much time and I have a long day tomorrow, I’ll listen just the time it takes to finish my cigarette and then I must ask you to leave”.
Speaking slowly but clearly through the teenage girl, Denis explained how Adrienne would fly over an oyster shaped lake the following morning and see what she thought was a clear passage off to the right. Instead she should turn left down another valley towards what seemed to be a sheer cliff with the shape of an upturned chair.
Adrienne was not amused, she did not believe in fortune telling and the last time she had consulted a clairvoyant in Paris the result had been losing nearly all her money betting on the wrong horse at the races. She stubbed out her cigarette and begged her visitor to leave.
The following morning Adrienne was freezing in the cockpit of her Caudron G3, she was starting to consider turning back, maybe her friends were right and her mission was pure folly. An oyster-shaped lake came into view and the words of the teenage girl from the previous evening came flooding back. Against all logic, Adrienne turned down the valley to the left towards a cliff looking like an upturned chair. As she approached the cliff wall, Adrienne felt her plane lifting in the wind - the air currents bouncing off the sheer sides of the valley created a lift which carried the fragile plane over the summit.
Adrienne saw the Pacific Ocean in the distance, she piloted her plane down to Santiago and landed just 3 hours after leaving Mendoza.
The French consul in Santiago was starting to believe that, after seven phone calls that morning and four messengers, maybe the story that some mad French woman had flown over the Cordillera was not some April Fool’s prank. He called his assistant from the next room, “quick, we have to get out to the airfield”
Adrienne sat drinking hot coffee in a hut at the Santiago airfield, she was still freezing from her flight and she was struggling with her poor Spanish as she tried to respond to the excited questions from half a dozen local journalists, eager to be the first to publish the story of the first woman to fly over the Andes.
The French consul walked in, Adrienne was happy at last to hear someone talking French but somehow the words no longer mattered. Her eyes locked into those of the consul’s assistant, the young French diplomat stared back. Adrienne knew why she had come all this way, everything suddenly made sense.
Denis was there too. Only he knew that 100 years later the great-grand-daughter of this couple would isolate and encapsulate the antibiotic properties of the grapefruit pip and thereby save the lives of many tens of millions of human beings suffering from the environment-induced infections of the 2020s.
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