At last the depressing silence is broken; one youth, wiser than his years, has remembered to provide himself with food. It is handed round, and over beef sandwiches we get communicative. It gives us fresh life and inspires one of the party with a humorous turn of mind, to recite with great vividness and vivacity all the alarming accidents that have befallen night-balloonists, concluding with an impious hope, “that we likewise may have some fun.”
We get it!
Happily, as we are wallowing in the throes of this most dismal expectancy, the conversation is turned by an eager and heated discussion between two younger members of the party, as to the merits and demerits of their respective musical-comedy idols (female). The argument grows in intensity. But we have neglected to watch the altimeter. Out of the inky darkness below there rushes a volcano of spark and flame. It is a railway-train speeding on through the night. Sheepishly we discover that we are only 800 feet, and wonder unpleasantly what might have been.
On and on through the night. Now we are getting tired; there are suggestions that we should land, but they are overruled. Coming down again to 800 feet, we catch sight of a wide glimmering sheet of water. Maps are seized in a hasty impulse to guess our whereabouts. The argument grows heated, for similar stretches of water there are, alike in Essex, Kent, Surrey, Middlesex and Berkshire: in fact, in every one of the Home Counties, and for the matter of that in the Midlands, and likewise in every county in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales.
The argument abates, our eyes grow weary and more weary. It seems a life-time since we last saw the pleasant and undulating lines of the earth. One or two heads are already nodding, when there is a sudden shout of “the dawn.” Instantly all are wide awake. There sure enough, are the first few streaks of gray creeping slowly across the eastern sky; without even that, it would be an obvious matter, by reason of that intense cold, which, in the air, always precedes the hour of daybreak and freezes us to the bone.
It would be an inadequate expression to say that dawn in the air is beautiful. It is more than beautiful, it is wonderful. It is more than wonderful, it is unusual; a view only to be enjoyed by the minority, and that of the smallest. Gradually earth and sky begin to dissemble. In tint the picture is white, black, gray, blue, crimson, golden, purple, green and every other color—now like a painter’s canvas smudged with regular irregularities, edged with red and gray, now an animated panorama stirring with resuscitated life. The sun rises, a ball of flame above the horizon, lighting up the rotund shape of the balloon with an unearthly hue.
We say nothing, but look and marvel; a word would be out of place in this sacred and awesome stillness. Suddenly we are roused by a cry, more, much more, alarming than the last.
The sea! We are almost on top of it. In shimmering, level surface it stretches on into obscurity. We are lost. We cannot avoid it, yet less can we land thereon. One of the crew loses his head. He snatches the thin red tape that hangs down from the envelope. There is a tearing, rending sound.