The proper state of the weather was indispensable and only in complete calms would the amusing exhibition take place. As in all exercises, bolder spirits attempted their excursions under perilous conditions in high or moderate winds, but these had often resulted in loss of life, the unhappy aeronaut falling or actually being driven headlong like a fly or moth beyond the valley into the solitudes and dangers of its encircling zones.
The harness—for it is nothing less—which the aeronaut assumes holds him easily and steadily to the three bubbles above him, and, as he generally can regulate his flight with his hands, his indeterminate control is over his descent. Few accidents occur. The balloons are symmetrized in position over him, the one at the waist being nearest his body and the two outside bags higher but on a level with each other. His control is entirely over the central balloon which he may quickly deplete by opening a valve. Variations of adjustment and of apparatus, as might be imagined, are numerous, and individual tastes or designs introduce great diversity. There may be four or five or even six balloons employed, but in this case they are made much smaller. The balloons may be of different sizes. Along the direction of increasing the number of maximum sized balloons lay the hopes of the bigger people, but there had been some bad mishaps, and the balance or adjustment proved difficult. The levitation became unmanageable, and the descents were often appallingly rapid and shockingly tragic.
When these air revels began—as they did at the Professor’s coronation—minus the crown—we momentarily seized upon the project of adapting this locomotion for our flight. It required a very brief inspection to utterly expose the hopelessness of this scheme and still more strongly occurred to us the prohibition from attempting to leave together. Such a wholesale evacuation, unless accomplished as one might say de coup de tonnerre, would never be practicable, and as Hopkins ruefully reminded us, “Ziliah may be an angel, but I’d rather sour on her prospects of being a balloonist.”
Literally I was the only free man, now that Goritz was gone, and literally upon me devolved the task of getting back, rousing the world, and effecting my friends’ release. How should, how could I do it?
Always distressed by this inseparable anxiety, the trip to the Gold Makers suddenly appealed to my searching mind with a strong likelihood that the great river we had skirted might carry me safely, and, too, with a swiftness beyond our hopes to liberty, though when more seriously considered, it might prove, I saw, to be only the Liberty of Death.
Immediately, therefore, after our return I found a convenient occasion to discuss this project with the Professor and Hopkins. It struck them both favorably, though they rather shrank from recommending it, as it was equally clear that if the river could be, as it were, employed at all, it would probably prove to be an obstreperous and mischievous servant. However, that way lay my path.
Under the pretence—hardly ever now were we free from some dogging spy at our elbows—of wishing to report more faithfully the operations of the Gold Makers in that book which he was writing on Radiumopolis, and which somehow had now captivated the fancy of the Council, the Professor (King Bjornsen), Hopkins and myself revisited the distant village. Although we were not permitted to go unattended, it was easy enough for me to engage the Samoyedes in conversation, and ask them about their knowledge of the great river. They spoke quite freely about it, and proved not only willing to tell me all they knew, but discouraged my plan to navigate the river to its mouth, by a not altogether lucid account of the attempt of one of their fishermen to venture on the river beyond the rocky gateway frowning on them to the west, and of his receiving some sort of violent treatment at its hands, he being thrown ashore and returning along the banks of the stream, reaching home almost more dead than alive. So ran their broken and obscure story.
Where was this man? “Dead.” Were any of his family, descendants, acquaintances, intimates, living? “Oh—yes—he knew everybody.” After some painstaking examination, accompanied by an immense amount of irrelevant recollections of what he did after his return, how he died, and how he was buried, his size, his strength, his obstinacy, and a recital of the disposition of his slender estate, I uncovered a trail of associations leading to an old blind man who was yet alive, and who, it was supposed, knew a little more exactly than anyone else what this daring disciple of Izaak Walton had seen or experienced.
This ancient was located, but it proved a mountainous task to extract much intelligible information from him, partly because he was dreadfully deaf, hopelessly stupid, and so incoherent that the interpreters chosen to interview him appeared to be at their wits’ ends to make him out, and more particularly because he was himself suspicious of his examiners.
I at last came away with the impression that the man had floated off peacefully on the swelling breast of the flood as it emerged from the broad lake-like embayment in the Gold Makers’ land, and had been carried along for a great distance at a rapid rate but not with much or any danger, until the descent brought him to a change in the bed or banks of the river (what this change was could not be determined), and that he had even survived this, but that later he jumped overboard from his raft (for raft it was), and reached the shore and, satisfied with his adventure, had made his way back by almost incredible exertions.