Word: helmeted
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Straight Down. By last week preparations were completed. Discoverer Lépineux had the traditional right to make the first descent. He buckled on his parachute harness, put a steel helmet over his woolen cap, adjusted his miner's head lamp and his altimeter, hooked his harness to the cable of the windlass and, after a quick handshake all around, stepped off into the void...
...real jolt came with the Ring cycle. When Wotan appeared on another dimmed-down stage in Das Rheingold, the murmur went up: "He has no helmet!" Muttered one oldtimer: "The stage is so dark I can't even see if he has a beard." (He had.) Shock followed shock. Wieland stripped his stages bare, cut down on all warlike gear save for a few essential spears. Siegfried's funeral pyre was left to the imagination. In Götterdämmerung, nobody got to see Valhalla burn: there was only a red glow in the sky, no sign...
There were compensations. The Metropolitan's Soprano Astrid Varnay sang such a sumptuous Brünnhilde that she made up for her missing helmet. In Siegfried, the dragon Fafner, an immense 30-ft. creation, emerged from a gaping cave in front-center (instead of from a miserable little hole to one side, as at the conventional Met). Fafner was so terrible in his oversize plungings and snortings that, probably for the first time in history, Siegfried seemed really brave to tackle...
Roman Catholic Flemings-need a King as a symbol of unity. Belgium's young dynasty, just over a century old, has usually known its place. Baudouin's grandfather, mountain-climbing King Albert, became Europe's best-loved monarch (in October 1918, in trench coat and battered helmet, Albert surprised the stout burghers of Ostend as the first allied soldier to enter that Belgian city on the heels of the fleeing Germans). But he never forgot the lesson his autocratic grandfather and predecessor Leopold I had learned through hard experience: in Belgium, a King is supposed to govern...
...gunning for an altitude where the outside air temperature is 67° F. below zero and the pressure low enough to make a man's blood boil; though the little plane's cockpit was pressurized and air-conditioned, Bridgeman wore a specially designed pressure-suit with a helmet like a deep-sea diver's. A tiny windshield wiper cleared the face plate of the condensed moisture from his breath...