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In a book was a record of all the ascents which have ever been made, beginning with Nos. 1 and 2 being those of Jacques Balmat and De Saussure, in 1787, and ending with No. 685, which wasn't cold yet.
There were rocky defiles and steep ascents to climb, river torrents to pass, rugged paths to mount, without a road to follow or a guide to conduct, and with clouds and fogs to double the dangers of the way.
But the best feature in connection with it was the fact that Mr. Glaisher himself was to make the ascents as scientific observer.
Sometimes there were long and gradual ascents, bleak, windy, and desolate, conveying the very impression which the reader gets from many passages of Miss Bronte's novels, and still more from those of her two sisters. Old stone or brick farm-houses, and, once in a while, an old church-tower, were visible; but these are almost too common objects to be noticed in an English landscape.
At this point we must, for a brief while, drop the history of the famous aeronaut whose early career we have been briefly sketching in the last chapter, and turn our attention to a new feature of English ballooning. We have, at last, to record some genuinely scientific ascents, which our country now, all too tardily, instituted.
He must, however, have ascended far higher peaks, since he is familiar with facts which only occur at a height of 10,000 feet or more above the sea mountain-sickness and its accompaniments of which his imaginary comrade Solinus tries to cure him with a sponge dipped in an essence. The ascents of Parnassus and Olympus, of which he speaks, are perhaps only fictions.
The Boy and I made an expedition into the town, for milk and water, but were obliged to climb one of the sharpest ascents hereabout, before our search was rewarded. A pretty little farmstead it is, up there on the lofty hill above us, with a wealth of chickens and an ample dairy, and fat fields and woods gently sloping backward into the interior.
Good heavens, you'd die of mountain sickness or exhaustion before you were half-way up." "Perhaps. I know very little about my ability as a climber, for I've never made any big ascents, though I've scrambled about in the mountains a little at home." "It would be madness for you to attempt such a thing. Why, don't you know it taxes the endurance of a strong man?
Through such scenes this generation too has lived and has had to learn again, what we never should have forgotten, that human history is not a smooth and well-rolled lawn of soft ascents; that it is mountainous, precipitous, terrific a country where all progress must be won by dint of intelligence and toil, and where it is as easy to lose the gains of civilization as it is to fall over a cliff or to surrender a wheat field to the weeds.
Wilbur Wright had come to Europe, and, flying at Le Mans and Pau it was on August 8th, 1908, that Wilbur Wright made the first of his ascents in Europe had stimulated public interest in flying in France to a very great degree.
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