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Updated: May 28, 2025
After a certain distance the difficulty increases progressively. It is so with the horse-power required to drive great ships across the ocean; it is so with the lifting power required to raise balloons in the air. A balloon goes up quite easily for a certain distance, but after a certain distance it refuses to go up any farther, because the air is too rarefied to float it and sustain it.
Being at a height of about six thousand feet, some accident happened to his balloon of inflammable air; it burst, they fell from that height, and were crushed to atoms. There was a montgolfier combined with the balloon of inflammable air. It is suspected the heat of the montgolfier rarefied too much the inflammable air of the other, and occasioned it to burst.
At yet higher levels, however, meteors appear to inflame by friction against the particles of air, and even at the height of eighty miles very faint clouds have at times been discerned, which are possibly composed of volcanic dust floating in the very rarefied medium, such as must exist at this great elevation.
It was a day to be remembered, and no one seemed to mind being a little tired when we returned late in the afternoon. The proprietor of the little log hotel that is only a short distance up the river, told Captain Spencer that we had gone down six good miles giving us a tramp altogether, of twelve miles. It seems incredible, for not one of us could walk one half that distance in less rarefied air.
"In a word, the various circumstances that change the actual density of the air, making it more rarefied at one point than another, produce currents, the force and direction of which depend upon the relative position of hot and cold atmospheric beds. Again, the winds acquire the temperature and characteristics of the regions they traverse."
"These," said he, "are the great vents appointed by nature for the discharge of that rarefied air and combustible matter, which, if confined, would burst the globe asunder; but, besides the larger outlets, there are some small chimneys through which part of the heat transpires; a vapour of that sort, I conceive, must pass through the bed or channel of this spring, the waters of which, accordingly retain a moderate warmth."
He lives in the rarefied air of the mountain tops, above the gulfs, on the threshold of the other world which he sees in part by flashes of grace, and he remains lucid, undazzled in the blaze of light around him.
He bowed himself on to the earth, and when he rose his face was white. In absolute silence he walked on. He was very silent now. In those high regions the rarefied air is hard to breathe by those born in the valleys; every breath he drew hurt him, and the blood oozed out from the tips of his fingers. Before the next wall of rock he began to work.
The highly rarefied air, rushing at great speed, when at its worst deprives the traveller of breath, skins his face and hands, and paralyses the baggage animals. In fact, neither man nor beast can face it. The horses 'turn tail' and crowd together, and the men build up the baggage into a wall and crouch in the lee of it. The heat of the solar rays is at the same time fearful.
In spite of the terror which rushed upon him, he hung fascinated over the hole, and by fixing the black point he distinguished appearances; in a light as of eclipse in rarefied air, he perceived at the basis of himself the panorama of his soul, a desert twilight on the horizons that approached the night, and under this doubtful light there seemed something like bare fields, a marsh heaped with rubbish and cinders; the place of the sins torn up by the confessor remained visible, but besides the dry darnel of dead vices which grew still, nothing budded.
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