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Updated: April 30, 2025
The fire was lighted under the machine, at first with dry birch-wood and afterwards with a bituminous composition, ingeniously concocted by one of the Brothers Gerli. In less than four minutes the balloon was completely inflated, and the men employed to hold it down with ropes perceived that it was on the point of rising. The aeronauts then gave the order to let go.
From the mast-head, the ocean appears either flat or slightly concave, and aeronauts declare that this apparent concavity becomes more marked, the higher they ascend. It is only at those rare periods when the air is so miraculously clear as to produce the effect of no air rendering impossible the slightest optical illusion that our eyes can see things as they really are.
Within half an hour they had successfully landed at the place indicated, and which had witnessed the coming and going of the young aeronauts on numerous occasions. Here at least they could remain and take things easy while waiting for the morning to slip along, so that eleven would roll around.
A few paces from this monument the cicerone will point out with his finger the spot where his rivals expired. "Such was the end of the first of aeronauts, and the most courageous of men," says a contemporaneous historian. "He died a martyr to honour and to zeal. His kindness, amiability, and modesty endeared him to all who knew him.
Meantime, the aeronauts leaving the city conveyed Government despatches as well as private correspondence, and in this wise Trochu was able to inform Gambetta that the army of Paris intended to make a great effort on November 29.
Overhead hung an ordinary tell-tale compass, and compactly placed on other parts of the wall were barometers, thermometers, barographs, and, in fact, practically every instrument that the most exacting of aeronauts or Space-explorers could have asked for.
The aeronauts, provided with large scale maps of the hostile country, will mark down to the gunners below the precise point upon which to direct their fire, and over hill and dale the shell will fly ten miles it may be to its billet, camp, massing night attack, or advancing gun.
The aeronauts passed an uneasy night. They raised their ship high in the air, anchoring it by a rope fast to a big tree, and they turned on no lights, for they did not want to betray their position. They descended before it was yet daylight, and a little later hurried to the place where the provisions were left.
"We are only aeronauts who have been to the North Pole. Good-bye!" "I won't do that again," said he. "Some of those people may die from the effects of this fright. But here we are again for home." Silver Cloud had again mounted skyward and encountered a splendid breeze from the north. A few moments later the blue, crystal waters of Lake Superior were undulating beneath them.
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