“Are we ascending or descending?” asked Mabel, “for the balloon is so steady that it does not seem to be moving at all.”
Her uncle, who, with far greater anxiety, had been asking himself the same question, replied in a voice still perfectly calm, “throw down some pieces of paper, and we shall ascertain that fact directly.”
Wondering that he should not know it without having recourse to experiment, Mabel immediately obeyed. “The bits seem to fall, not like paper, but like lead!” she exclaimed.
“Then we must be ascending rapidly still,” muttered Augustine; and he pulled the rope with such desperate force that it snapped in his hand, and all communication with the all-important valve was broken off for ever.
“God have mercy upon us!” was Augustine’s instinctive prayer, not uttered aloud from the fear of alarming his companions. The thick mist prevented Mabel from having any clear idea of what her uncle was doing, but she thought him strangely silent, and a damping chill came over her young spirit like the fog which enwrapped her form. Augustine looked up almost in despair at the huge indistinct mass looming as a dark cloud above him. Oh! that there were but any means of tearing open a passage for the gas! The wicker car, suspended by ropes, hung too low beneath the ball for it to be possible for Aumerle’s extended arm to reach the silken globe, or his penknife would have at once offered an easy solution of the difficulty. A light, agile sea-boy might possibly have climbed one of the ropes, and so have reached the inflated ball; but the brain of Augustine turned dizzy at the very thought of attempting to clamber at the awful height to which he knew that he must now have attained. His frame was remarkable for strength as well as for manly beauty, but was altogether unfitted for a perilous feat like this. To have attempted it must have been inevitably to fall and perish.
Suddenly, to Mabel’s relief, the balloon emerged from its misty shroud, and burst again into the brightness of day. The scene was one never to be forgotten, but Mabel was the only one of the travellers whose mind was sufficiently at ease to enjoy its sublime and awful beauty.
Above was the sky—deeply, intensely blue, such as in Italy meets the enchanted gaze. Below was a floor of pure white cloud, spread out, as it appeared to Mabel, like a vast sea of cotton, on which lay piled here and there vast masses, or islands of snow. Some of these masses were floating beneath them with a slow and majestic motion, impelled by currents of wind which did not reach the strata of air to which the balloon had ascended. Presently the white floor seemed gradually to part on either side, and an opening appeared through which a strange panoramic view of the earth burst on the wondering eye. It lay—Oh! how far beneath! There was no distinction of mountain or plain, a dim blue hue tinted all. In the words of a former æronaut,—“The whole appeared a perfect plain, the highest building having no apparent height, but reduced all to the same level, and the whole terrestrial prospect seemed like a coloured map.” There lay Dashleigh Hall, the seat of ancestral pride, shrunk to the appearance of a tiny toy,—a mere nothing viewed from that awful height, even as all earth’s pomps and grandeur must appear to those who survey them from heaven. For the first time since he had worn his honours, Dashleigh felt them no cause for pride. He was in his own eyes no peer, no lofty aristocrat, but a poor, weak child of man, with every nerve unstrung, and an undefined horror hanging over him. Gladly would he then have exchanged places with the poorest peasant standing on solid ground, though not possessing a single foot of it.
“Look upwards—upwards—not downwards!” cried Augustine, alarmed at the wild expression on the haggard face of his friend. “Lie down, Dashleigh, at the bottom of the car, and fix your gaze on the sky above!”
“Uncle!” exclaimed Mabel, “how strange your voice sounds—like what one might hear in a dream; and my own, too, seems quite different from what it was when we were on the ground.”