“And that is—what, uncle Phaeton?”
“Observe, my lads,” with a wave of his hand towards those whirling walls, and then making a downward motion. “You see that we are floating in a partial vacuum, yet where there is air sufficient to preserve life under difficulties. And by looking downward—careful that you don't fall overboard through dizziness, though!”
“Looks as though we were floating just above a bed of ugly wind!” declared Waldo, after taking a look below.
“Precisely; the aerostat rests upon an air-cushion amply solid enough to sustain far more than our combined weight. But what is the generally accepted view, my dear boys?”
“You tell, for we don't know how,” frankly acknowledged Waldo.
“Thanks. Yet you are now far wiser than all of the scientists who have written and published whole libraries concerning these storm formations, but whose fallacies we are now fully prepared to explode, once for all, through knowledge won by personal investigation—ahem!”
Strange though it may appear, the professor forgot the mutual danger by which they were surrounded, and trotted off on his hobby-horse in blissful pride, paying no attention to the hideous uproar going on, only raising his voice higher to make it heard by his youthful auditors.
“The common belief is that, while these tornadoes are hollow, even through the trunk or tongue down to its contact with the earth, that hollow is caused by a constant suction, through which a steady stream of debris is flowing, to be sown broadcast for miles around after emerging from the open top of the so-called balloon.”
“But it isn't at all like that,” eagerly cried Waldo, pointing to where the fragments were flowing upward through those walls themselves, yet far enough from that hollow interior to be but indistinctly seen save on rare occasions. “Look at 'em scoot, will ye? Oh, if we could only climb up like that!”
Professor Featherwit was keenly watching and closely studying that very phenomena through all, and now he gave a queer little chuckle, as he nodded his head with vigour, before dryly speaking.