The run to Baltimore was made without accident or delay. Mr. Bonflon and myself conversed a good deal, and I found additional cause to admire the discriminating character of his mind and the curious and wonderful stores it contained. Some of the time we dozed, or sunk into a mental confusion like that to which the body was subjected by the motion of the cars, and called it sleep. My own most impressive visions, however, were those of silent wakefulness, and were connected with the morrow and the "Flying Cloud."
We stopped in the chief city of Maryland only long enough to obtain some slight refreshments, such as could be furnished readily in the middle of the night, and proceeded at once to the wharf or station of our sky-sailer. Ah, how shall I describe my sensations on first beholding this most wonderful achievement of the age, and thus satisfying myself that it was an actual existence, and not the mere chimera of a diseased brain? There she sat like a majestic swan, floating, as it were, in the pure empyrean, and crowned with a diadem of stars. The Moon, Arcturus, and the Pleiades might well all make obeisance to her, and the Milky Way invite her to extend her flight and plough its snowy fields. I was astonished at her size, the symmetry of her parts, and the harmony of her proportions, as she lay there at a great height, which I was quite unable to estimate, in bold relief against the sky.
But Mr. Bonflon could afford me but a brief time for observation and the indulgence of my wonder. The stores and most of the passengers were already on board; and taking me by the arm, he hurried me forward, and seated me in the small car or tender, by means of which, and the agency of ropes and pulleys, we were to reach her decks. Our upward movement immediately commenced. It was steady and gentle, not calculated to create alarm; and still the notion of quitting Mother Earth for an indefinite number of days, to rove in the blue unknown of space, was attended with some apprehensions and regrets. I gazed anxiously at the receding objects below; but my feelings underwent a change as we approached the "Flying Cloud" herself, were pulled into her gangway, and I found myself standing on her solid decks. A brief further period intervened, and our anchor was loosed; the tremendous machine became instinct with life; she began to move; and, hurrah! we were under way.
The thoughts and emotions of this bewildering moment it is impossible to describe. Our craft moved off majestically, like some huge water-fowl rising from the sea. Her course was westward and upward, like the eagle with his face turned toward the palace of the sun. At first the lights in the city of Baltimore became more numerous and distinct, as intervening objects were surmounted and overlooked. Next they began to fade, shrinking down into twinkling points like fireflies, until they disappeared. Forests, hills, and mountains followed after, as our altitude was increased, blending together like a hazy landscape, until, on passing above the cloud region, and finding the level of our track, the earth was wholly lost to our view, and our course lay through the blue serene of space, without a lighthouse or a landmark, and nothing but the constant lamps of heaven to guide us in our passage.
What a sea! The ocean has its visible surface on which move the ships; but we had none. The heavens were beneath us as well as above. We were floating in the great circle of the systems and the suns. We were of the universe; but were to be numbered with the constellations and the stars. We could compare ourselves to a company of immortals quitting the earth and traversing the electric seas which lead to brighter homes. Or we were voyagers to the sun, or to the nearer Venus, or to the far distant Centaurus. What a world of new thought was forced upon us by the fancies and realities and charm and awe of our extraordinary condition, combined with the profound consciousness we could not fail to entertain of the effects which this crowning discovery of Messrs. Bonflon and De Aëry must produce on travel, on commerce, on art, and the common destiny of mankind!
I found the atmosphere of the cabins, as my friend Bonflon had asserted, agreeable and healthful. I could also occupy the promenade deck for half an hour with little inconvenience, so far as the levity of the air was concerned; but the cold was severe; while the system, in consequence of an undue expansion of its particles, solid and fluid, from the diminished pressure of the atmosphere, was rendered doubly susceptible to its influence. The advice given by Mr. Bonflon to case myself in flannels, with an armament at hand of outer winter clothing, proved well-timed; and yet a period of lassitude, verging on faintness, invariably followed every considerable exposure to the open air.
But the pleasure of gazing on those fields of space without obstruction, without the intervention of so much as a plate of crystal glass, repaid me for every risk and every ill. Though it might be said there was no scenery there, where nothing was visible but the stars, yet far beyond the power of mountain and valley, forest and lake, waterfall and ocean, did that scene, which was no scene, or next to none, bind me in the spell of its fascination. The motion of our craft, as we careered noiselessly through the shoreless and objectless void, without sense of effort or friction, was a charm of itself,—bringing to a flower, crystallizing into refulgent stars, the dim, obscure, however glorious, poetry of life. Here were the wildest imaginations of the dreamer melted in a crucible, and reproduced in living forms of usefulness and beauty. In my own years of widely diversified experience, what had I met with to compare with this? Nothing. The force of steam was marvellous,—talking over a wire mysterious; but here I was in a great ship riding among the planets and the stars. I had likened Niagara to a vast mill-dam, because I could find no peer to set beside it; so now, in my weakness, the sublime pageant of the "Flying Cloud" could search out nothing higher in my recollection with which to compare it than a wild, ride of my youth in a canoe, for a half mile or so, down the rapids of a river.
But morning was at hand. The rich golden glow of night, to which the dwellers on the earth's surface are accustomed, as we passed to higher altitudes, had given place to a thin inky blue. This was obscured by no fleck or mist, and yet the stars shone through it faint and dim, despoiling the firmament of its glory. The same loss of power was manifest on the ushering in of day. The auroral flame, which ordinarily greets us in the east with such a ruddy laugh, was now nothing better than a wan and dismal smile; and even the sun, as he struggled up from what seemed a bed of leaden mist, brought with him only a pallid, lifeless twilight. It was not that his rays were impeded by cloud or haze; he had lost his power to shine. He hung there in the heavens like a great white shield, and looked down on us as rayless and powerless and devoid of life as a dead man's eye.
Having at length wearied myself with gazing, and feeling chill and weak from the coldness and tenuity of the atmosphere, I subsided into the comfort and companionship of the cabins below. Among the passengers I recognized attachés of the press, besides several gentlemen of Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, with whom I was somewhat acquainted. More circumspect, or less slaves to the imagination than myself, they had contented themselves with in-door observations. But their enthusiasm was none the less inflamed. In astonishment they looked at each other; in restless bewilderment they glanced out of the windows on the desert, trackless plane traversed by the "Flying Cloud," and spoke with a species of awe of the shock which the announcement of what they were then witnessing would give to sober men's minds; and suggested, in broken sentences, some of the consequences which would be likely to flow from the grand invention.
What with excitement and lack of sleep, we all found ourselves a little nervous. Coffee and Havanas failed to allay the feeling; and, in the absence of the morning papers, we resorted to whist, chess, and our pocket supplies of the "Atlantic Monthly," "Harper," and so forth, and to the very select library provided by Messrs. Bonflon and De Aëry, the proprietors, for the use of the passengers,—and at last to our beds. It could not be denied that we were nervous. With all the smoothness and beauty of our running, there was a sensation, an uncertain quivering motion, not at first noticed and not at all definable, about our craft, that constantly, suggested the idea that we were standing on nothing, or, at best, nothing better than dissolving quicksands, which were liable at any moment wholly to slide away and leave us; and it required some strength of mind to resist the vagary, and prevent it from effecting a troublesome lodgment in the imagination.