But below was a prospect indescribable in its loveliness and weird in its unfamiliarity. Every house, tree, road, garden and field was outlined with startling distinctness and sharpness of detail, but of Liliputian size and in preposterous perspective.
Swiftly we sped along, bearing northwards at some forty miles an hour. Dulwich, Camberwell, Peckham Rye, Bermondsey, swept by, their parks and gardens and ever-thickening streets almost unnoticed, for now all eyes were turned on the shining river, and the great dark mass of the Metropolis we were so quickly approaching, and whose faint murmur was even now striking our ears. It was as we had foreseen—we were to cross London, and at its densest point. Fortune was favouring us indeed, for not twice in thirty ascents from the Palace does such an event occur.
And now we were actually over Southwark, and about to cross the gleaming Thames that wound so sinuously through the maze and tangle of streets, lost in haze as it crept towards the sea, and dazzling in its brilliance where it reflected the waning sunlight. Dotted about upon its surface were a fleet of the sweetest possible little toy ships—tiny models, such as children would sail in their baths at bedtime. Across it we could trace each teeming thoroughfare, Tower Bridge in particular standing out as a beautiful little miniature.
Every block and square, the great arteries of traffic and the less-trodden by-lanes, were delineated as in a huge map. There was St. Paul's looking as Sir Christopher Wren surely never dreamed of, there the great square of the Tower and the shimmering water of the Docks. Conspicuous among the wilderness of roofs eastward shone out an enclosure of little white objects, puzzling at first, but which we presently decided to be the gravestones of some large cemetery—Tower Hamlets probably.
We crossed the river between London and Tower bridges and kept our course north with just a dash of east in it; and all the while the air was full of a strange loud noise, a deep continuous hum, not so much that of bees in the limes or at swarming time, as the ceaseless roar of vast machinery, the booming drone of a mighty dynamo, suggesting sleepless activity, endless motion, and infinite strength and power. It was the voice of the toiling millions, the whirr of the engines of nations, the throb of the heart of the world.
Northward yet, and the streets thinned out and the fields and trees appeared again, and the roar gave place to an almost deathlike silence, for we were above the height to which the sounds of country life could penetrate. We seemed to cross a region of market-gardeners, and at one place all the country appeared covered with hot-houses, whose glass roofs glittered like diamonds. Anon and all the lovely plain was studded with stately mansions and rich men's country seats.
WHAT THE CRYSTAL PALACE GROUNDS LOOKED LIKE AS I LEFT THEM.
On and on over park and field and wood. Presently our balloon began dropping, and we noted that at 3,200 feet elevation the first sounds reached us, the crowing of a cock, a dog's bark, and the shrill voices of children. Above that height all had been absolute silence, except for the occasional report of a gun, which, however, sounded sharp and short, and different from what it was at lesser elevation.
Down we swooped until we could see the rabbits in a field scuttling to their holes and the ducks on a pond flapping with consternation at our approach. All the neighbourhood turned out to look at us and cheer. We hailed one farmstead and inquired our whereabouts, but we could not catch the reply, though we heard one old woman plainly protesting we were knocking the tiles off her roof with our trail rope.