The financier frankly gave it up; with a rending gasp he fell back in a dead faint.
Tinker shrugged his shoulders, regulated the pace of the machine by letting gas flow from the cylinder into the balloon till it was of the proper buoyancy, then roped the senseless financier to the bottom of the car, and came back to the helm.
The wind they had risen into had been blowing towards the east, so they had not lost ground during their tossing, but they had been driven south of their course, and he did not know exactly how to get back to it. On the dark earth beneath he could see towns as blurs of light on all sides of him, but no one of them was big enough to be Paris. He let the machine swoop on down to five hundred feet, and up again. On the upward course, from fifteen hundred feet he saw a great blur of light on the northern horizon: it was Paris, and he was swooping past it. He steered the machine round without taking the way off her, and swooped down towards the city. At the end of the swoop he was already over the suburbs, and he switched off the electric lamps. He took the way off the machine by switching up the planes; and then, using only the propeller, circled round, seeking for the Eiffel Tower. Presently he saw it looming through the first dim grey light of the dawn, steered over it, let fall a grapnel, and hooked it into the railings which ran round it; took a turn of the rope round the windlass, and wound the machine down to within twenty feet of the top. Then he went to the financier, unroped him, and kicked him in the ribs ungently.
As he kicked, saying, "Get up! Get up!" an astonished voice below cried, "Qui vive?"
Looking over the side of the car Tinker saw dimly the figure of a gendarme, and said briskly, "Santos-Dumont!"
"Vive Santos-Dumont!" cried the gendarme with enthusiasm.
Tinker went back to the financier, and kicked him again.
"Where am I? Where am I?" he murmured faintly.
"On the top of the Eiffel Tower," said Tinker.
"What? Saved! Saved!" cried the financier, for all the world as though he had been in a melodrama; and he sat up.