The Sojourner by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Not the wings beat, but the motors. The plane was a great bird with two hearts, palpable and pulsating. It ran across the runway like a plover, like a plover lifted suddenly into the air. Ase was conscious of the straining climb. Space was a heavy thing, it pushed the weight of the universe on the metallic bird to hold it down, the twin hearts throbbed against it. More than ever Ase felt that men were not held to earth, and by it, but were crushed there by an imponderable vastness. The tallest trees could grow no taller, not that their roots chained them, or the force of gravity, but because their strength was unequal to the greater pressure. The earth had thrust up its mountains as high as possible, and the mountains were collapsing not from below but from above, as though the kind firm hand of a master pressed on a dog and a great voice said quietly, "Down."

The plane leveled off. The twin hearts had won their battle, the motored bird was in its element and there was now no sense of motion at all. Ase had imagined that even enclosed in the belly of the mechanical bird, he would be conscious of flight. He wanted to feel the effort, the winds of the world streaming past his face. The sense of height was compensation. He saw the earth plainly as a battered planet. The skin was cracked and wrinkled, gashed with canyons, torn and split by rivers. Mountains were jumbles of sterile stone. Cities were already ruins, as though he saw them a thousand years in the future, or in the past. Only the farms and fields were beautiful. Green and red and golden and violet squares and rectangles spoke of man's sole kindness to the earth. Ase wished he had celestial seeds to scatter, to drift down on the brown fresh-plowed acres, there to grow some rare unearthly crop. He would tell young Jan of this fancy, and they would smile together.