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TRY this next time you are strolling on a cliff. Toss a rock (the size of a blood orange is good) over the edge and begin to count. It falls at the speed of a tumbling human so will reach 200km per hour after nine seconds, roughly the acceleration of a supercar. Keep counting. If the cliff is sheer and tall, like the more dramatic ones above a Norwegian fjord, you should be able to tick off many seconds before hearing a distant crack. That is how long you might fly, unaided, before your soft flesh is mangled on the granite below.

Next, get ready to hop off. You will probably be terrified, which is a shame, for fear interferes with perception. Tunnel vision blocks the smell of moss on the cliffside, the tinkling of a waterfall halfway down. But the adrenalin rush, legs hollow and wobbly, ensures it is a memorable experience. “That second before you step off is the best. Everything is quiet, you step into emptiness,” says Karina Hollekim who, after more than 400 flying leaps, is emerging as a star of increasingly popular films about falling off high objects.

Now go over. A Superman pose (keep your stomach in) is the standard method, some 45° forward, so that in the first five or six seconds you become horizontal. The more daring go head first to get up speed. At first you hardly feel the motion. There is no sound (screams aside); not even the rustling of wind in your clothes. You may feel you are hanging, frozen, in mid-air. “When I first jumped it seemed I wouldn't move, or fly, at all. For those first seconds I thought it was not working,” recalls Stein Edvardsen, a pioneering Norwegian jumper who has been at it for more than a decade. “It felt like an eternity as Mother Earth was pulling me down,” he says.

Butterflies are unlikely—it is not like hitting turbulence in a plane—because your stomach falls at the same speed as the rest of you, but you feel weightless and time slows. Then, after six seconds, there is friction. “To get an idea of what it feels like, put your hand out of the window of the car when you are driving at 150km per hour,” suggests Mr Edvardsen. So far you have been falling; now you are ready to fly.

Being close to the wall makes it especially satisfying. Ms Hollekim likes spotting startled birds that nest in cracks in the rock or, jumping from skyscrapers, to study roofs of smaller buildings as they rise up. At this speed the human body may curve away from the cliff. At a popular spot in Norway, Kjerag near Stavanger in the west, you have 16 seconds of freefall in which to swoop around, some of it just ten metres from the rock face. In Trollveggen (Troll Wall), an even more dramatic drop in the middle of the country, you may plummet for a long half minute, allowing time for backflips, somersaults, or hurtling side by side with a friend. Then, sometimes as late as a second or two before impact, you should find the cord to deploy your parachute. You need both time and speed for the chute to prove useful, however. Pulling the cord too late is one of the easier ways to kill yourself. Falling too slowly—if you have made the mistake of leaping from something near the ground, like a church tower—could be fatal, too, as the parachute may fail to open fully.

Panos

To prolong the flight some have turned to fancy dress. Wingsuits, which have flaps between the limbs, look ridiculous but allow cliff-jumpers to float in the air for minutes at a time, changing direction at will. Oyvind Lokerberg in Trondheim is one of a group of ten local men who test the dynamics of flying from mountains in wingsuits. The goal is to get up as much speed as possible, giving the flyer more control. “Today you can reach 350km per hour in almost a head-on dive, then when you pull up into the horizontal you can be moving at about 230km per hour,” he says. The perfect suit covers the smallest area possible while still giving decent lift (the worst are about as effective as clinging to a mattress). The current fashion seems to be a suit that looks like a bat or a flying fox (see left). Mr Lokerberg and his colleagues refine their designs in wind tunnels then try them out on mountains.

Eventually, thinks Ms Hollekim, someone will try to land in a wingsuit, without using a parachute. Mr Lokerberg, laughing, is sceptical: “Remember one day Newton [or rather his law of gravity] is going to come and get you.” A flight in a wingsuit alone would demand an extremely soft spot—a hillside covered in deep powdered snow, for instance—to land in.

Until then enthusiasts seek new thrills by finding new places to fall from—“You get tired of jumping off the same cliff every day,” says Mr Edvardsen—or by trying more convoluted acrobatics on the way down. Ms Hollekim grew fond of throwing herself off mountains while on skis. The weight of the equipment makes it much harder to keep upright in the air and skis stop you looking over the edge before you leap. Now, after 25 efforts, she thinks ski-basing is a bit too risky. Gripping videos on YouTube show others sledging off mountain tops, cartwheeling over the edge and dancing their way into the abyss.

This weird sport is known as base-jumping: the name refers to the four things that can be leapt from—buildings, antennae, spans (bridges) and earth (cliffs). It is increasingly popular. In America enthusiasts make an annual pilgrimage to El Capitan, a cliff in Yosemite National Park which was the site of the first such jump, in 1966. Those keen on leaping from tall buildings flock to cities in Asia. Kuala Lumpur hosts an annual world championship. But Norway, well-supplied with fjords and cliffs, remains the sport's spiritual home. Carl Boenish, the American who named it, died jumping off Trollveggen in 1984; Thor Axel Kappfjell (pictured top), another base-jumping hero, died jumping off Kjerag in 1999.

Parachutes open too late or squalls of wind send a jumper into a cliff. The unluckiest have crashed onto a ledge and died slowly from exposure

Norwegians are an outdoors sort of people, and all that nature “invites you to use it” says Ms Hollekim. Jumpers are supposed to be experienced sky-divers before leaping from land. In practice not everyone is. The kit (an appropriate parachute and a good pair of boots) is about $2,500 new, and some jumpers cut costs by buying second-hand. Malfunctions are often deadly. As there is no time to deploy a second parachute nobody carries a spare.

Organised events seem pretty safe: this summer at Kjerag, for example, saw 2,500 jumps completed with only a broken ankle to show for it. But fatal accidents are hardly uncommon. Jumping off Trollveggen was banned after 11 accidents and four deaths in the space of 280 jumps in the early 1980s. An experienced Australian was killed in August in north-west Norway when his parachute failed. A list online details 120 jumpers killed at the latest count. The cause of death is usually described as “impact”, although drowning has claimed a few lives. Parachutes open too late or squalls of wind send a jumper into a cliff. The unluckiest crash onto a ledge and die slowly from exposure. But without the risk, it wouldn't be fun.

Despite appearances it does not seem to attract the mad or suicidal. Jumpers have to be meticulous about their gear, and many seem as attracted by the outdoor life as by the adrenalin.

The enthusiastic Ms Hollekim is thrilled to be alive and walking. She limps off to her latest movie premiere in London after describing how an entangled parachute nearly killed her in 2006. She hit rocks at more than 100km per hour. Her legs were pulped, fractured in 25 places, and she lost 3.5 litres of blood. She spent four months in hospital, underwent 15 operations, narrowly avoided amputation, and endured nine months in rehabilitation. The pain, she says, was unbelievable. But jumping off cliffs has been the most powerful experience of her life and she regrets none of it. “It forces you to feel. Extreme fear, then relief, then happiness. In my everyday life I don't feel that much. But, in the air, it's like being in love.”