From the Library

[Biggles]

When things conspire - the traffic is thick and wild, the sun is leaving moment for moment, rain slicks the surface of the road - the rider best understands what can otherwise remain hidden: that a motorcyclist is both the happy passenger on an amusement park ride and its earnest operator. The rider  splits into two, navigating between vacation and dire responsibility.
Sons Of Thunder p24  Melissa Pierson

[Biggles]

The burble of my exhaust unwound like a long cord behind me. Soon my speed snapped it, and I heard only the cry of the wind which my battering head split and fended aside. The cry rose with my speed to a shriek: while the air's coldness streamed like two jets of iced water into my dissolving eyes. I screwed them to slits, and focused my sight two hundred yards ahead of me on the empty mosaic of the tar's gravelled undulations.
Like arrows the tiny flies pricked my cheeks: and sometimes a heavier body, some house-fly or beetle, would crash into face or lips like a spent bullet. A glance at the speedometer: seventy-eight. Boanerges is warming up. I pull the throttle right open, the top of the slope, and we swoop flying across the dip, and up-down up-down the switchback beyond: the weighty machine launching itself like a projectile with a whirr of wheels into the air at the take-off of each rise, to land lurchingly with such a snatch of the driving chain as jerks my spine like a rictus.
Sons Of Thunder p30  T. E. Lawrence

[Biggles]

Traffic this morning was mainly Morris Oxfords, doing their thirty up or down. Boa and myself were pioneers of the new order, which will do seventy or more between point and point. Like all pioneers we incurred odium. The Morris Oxfords were calculating on other traffic doing their own staid forty feet a second. Boa was doing 120. While they were thinking about swinging off the crown of the road to let him pass, he had leaped past them, a rattle and roar and glitter of polished nickel, with a blue button on top. They waved their arms wildly, or their sticks, in protest. Boa was round the next corner, or over the next-hill-but-two while they were spluttering. Never has Boa gone better. I kept on patting him, and opening his throttle, knowing all the while that in a month or two he will be someone else's, and myself in a land without roads or speed. If I were rich he should have a warm dry garage, and no work in his old age. An almost human machine, he is, a real prolongation of my own faculties: and so handsome and efficient. Never have I had anything like him.
Sons Of Thunder p35-6  T. E. Lawrence

[Biggles]

I had bought my motorbike soon after I was sixteen. It was a second-hand Ariel 500cc and it cost me twenty-two pounds. It was a wonderful big powerful machine and when I rode upon it, it gave me an amazing feeling of winged majesty and of independence that I had never known before. Wherever I wished to go, my mighty Ariel would take me. Up to then, I had either had to walk or bicycle or buy a ticket for a bus or a train and that was a slow business. But now all I had to do was sling one leg over the saddle, kick the starter and away I went. I got the same feeling a few years later when I flew single-seater fighter planes in the war.
Sons Of Thunder p41  Roald Dahl

[Biggles]

With my clarinet strapped behind me I got almost to Rochester to encounter the tail of what proved to be a six-mile queue. As carefully as one does in such circumstances, I rode past it all - and was dismayed by the anger and hostility of all those stationary motorists, blaring their horns or even waving fists at me. 
There was no way in which I could have been harming them, but the thought that I was going and they were not aroused furious jealousy. Even on a good motorcycle, the world can be a sad place.
Sons Of Thunder p52  L. J. K. Setright

[Biggles]

Down the Hoggar Massif, descending 1,000ft, skimming over sand dunes like surfing sea waves, we grappled drifts with high revs in low gear. It was like tackling hazards in a club trials event. Chiding each other several times about intentionally picking out every rock and rift and nearly having us both fall off, we kept rolling along. We fell about three feet over an unseen rim that put a strain on every nut and bolt. Bienk on the 'Moseley' rear mudguard pillion seat, came down just right to hold on to something, saving herself from being dumped. Dark patches of hard mineral ground were showing up through the sand here and there and between them were these treacherous hollows of powder-like sand. We pounced from one hard patch to another to skim across these sand-traps until they became longer, deeper and softer and eventually trapped our wheels. Everything was unloaded again, carried across and then the unladen combination coaxed through these dangerous sink holes, while we sung the oarsman's chant, 'One - two - PUSH!'
Sons Of Thunder p73  Theresa Wallach

[Biggles]

As we rounded a bend we ran into a drove of oxen, and I heard Ernesto call out in a slightly shaky voice, "The brake's gone!"
We were going downhill and we could see that the slope ended in a row of poplars some 400 yards ahead. The bike was still picking up speed, but in fact I felt no fear. Looking back on it now, knowing that a river ran behind the poplars, I reckon this could have been the end of the line for us. At the very least we might have broken a few bones. But all I did was tell Fuser to brake using the gears and run the bike into the hill.
With a degree of confidence quite unwarranted in an inexperienced driver, Ernesto got the bike into third, then into second, which reduced our speed considerably, and finally, with difficulty, he got it into first. At once, taking advantage of our slower speed, he aimed the bike straight at the bank. As I jumped off the back he spread his legs, and I saw him come off the seat just a fraction of a second before the front wheel hit the mountain. We ran to switch off the engine to prevent a fire, and then shook hands, happy still to be alive.
Sons Of Thunder p81-2  Alberto Granado