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Enders looked like a schoolboy on a frolic, Mr. Carter looked sullen and tried lazily not to mar the sport completely, while Mr. Harold looked timidly foolish and half afraid of our wild sport. Mrs. Badger laughed, the General roared, Anna flew around like a balloon, Miriam fairly danced around with fun and frolic, while I laughed so that it was an exertion to change corners.
They were then put in a sort of wooden cage, let down by chains from a huge wooden beam, and swung round in the air like the unloading cranes of a great city, over the surf to a high platform on the land. "Well, this is a new way to land," cried Ted, who had been rather quiet during the performance, and his father thought a trifle frightened. "It's a sort of a balloon ascension, isn't it?"
The two young men, although they worked actively, could not help noticing that it was exceptionally dull, and they felt the atmosphere very heavy. "It is singular!" said Erik, "but I feel a roaring in my ears as if I were some distance above the earth in a balloon." Almost immediately his nose began to bleed. Otto had a similar sensation, although not quite so severe.
"By the way," he said, "I am going to make a balloon excursion to-morrow. I didn't mention it to the society because these fellows gab so. There'd be a great crowd round, and I'd only have been hampered. When you mean work, the less you say about it beforehand the better. That is what I have always found. Ever up in a balloon?" "No," said Josiah, "but I should very much like to go."
We were perfectly safe from musketry fire, as we lay, perhaps, two miles from the Boer trenches, which were being shelled by some of our guns close by. The enemy's artillery was practically silent. Presently, on looking round, I descried our balloon away out behind us about two miles off. Then she steadily rose and made several trips to a good height, but what could be seen from that distance?
There was a movement in the crowd, which seemed to be invading the enclosure. "Let go!" The balloon rose slowly, but I experienced a shock which threw me to the bottom of the car. When I got up, I found myself face to face with an unexpected fellow-voyager, the pale young man. "Monsieur, I salute you," said he, with the utmost coolness. "By what right " "Am I here?
Those were by no means agreeable walks, especially when the cold weather had set in, as it did early that autumn; and every now and again at the end of the journey one found that it had been made in vain, for, the wind having shifted at the last moment, the departure of the balloon had been postponed. Of course, the only thing to be done was to trudge back home again.
But the problem of the dirigibility of a boat, or of a balloon, is simplicity itself compared with the amazing complexity of the problems involved in producing a dirigible civilization. It falls under Bacon's category of "things which never yet have been performed." Heretofore civilizations have floated on the cosmic atmosphere.
The mother, however, was "all there," in more senses than one. She was of about observation balloon proportions, and had an unerring eye for the main chance. Her telegraphic address, I should imagine, was "Fleecem."
However, such was the case, and we had great difficulty in getting him back into the car. We discovered far more wells than we had been led to believe existed, but not enough to make a flank attack a very serious menace. The mirage played all sorts of tricks, and the balloon observers grew to be very cautious in their assertions.
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