I. The Other Side of Things. from the sequence Sky Gladiatorials Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown made the first non-stop aerial crossing of the Atlantic, Newfoundland to Ireland, 1919.Previous to that, they both flew for Britain in World War I. Alcock ‘was the first man to bomb Istanbul’; then, with plane trouble, crashed-landed near Suvla, 1917. He was imprisoned in Kedos, Turkey. Air is crisp in the cockpit and seeded with summer when he flies toward that once powerful city. Constantinople, desired, mysterious, Mimar Sinan’s mosques of exquisite geometry defining its shape. Libraries bulge with rare illuminated books. A city lovely in both poetry and Churchill’s dreams sits unaware of the bombs Alcock clutches under his plane The boy Irfan Orga is nine, father taken to the war, never to return, his small brother ill from hunger, grandmother sharing their two rooms, hampered by new poverty, their home burned out by fire, everything of beauty gone. In Mahmut Paşa Street, his mother struggles through the crowded market to forage, unused to being …