The advice is worth following. No sooner said than done, and the basket after kicking off the top of a haystack, drops in the midst of the dumfounded farmers.
Relieved for a second of its weight, the “Rolla” bounds ahead. More ballast flies out, and we are off on another trip to the clouds.
Exposed, as it is, alternately to the burning rays of the sun and the numerous cool currents that we meet on our way, the “Rolla” soon becomes flighty and hard to control. A few minutes later we are not two hundred feet over the meadows.
Another rise, without apparently any cause for it, and soon we are falling again; this time over the ancient city of Sens, with its beautiful cathedral, around which the quaint old houses are huddled, and held close together by a belt of green boulevards.
As I wonder how we would look impaled on that sharp gothic steeple, a dozen pounds of ballast sends us skyward like a rocket.
“It’s not the distance, it’s the pace that kills.”
L. A. Robertson: The Dead Calypso.
IV.
IT WAS then ten o’clock. We had traveled by actual measurement on the map, one hundred and eighty kilometers. The heat was increasing rapidly and the sensitive bubble over our heads had become more erratic than ever. Down it would drop a few thousand feet, if a cloud happened to darken the sun, and then up three or four thousand, as soon as the cloud had passed on.
This constant “bobbing” up and down at a terrific pace, added to the heat and lack of sleep, was gradually telling on our nerves. Ten hours in a basket, under such circumstances, is about as much as any ordinary man can stand. Without wasting any time in idle discussion, we decided to atterrir—in other words, to land, as soon as the necessary arrangements for this important operation had been completed.