Page:Artabanzanus (Ferrar, 1896).djvu/50

42 the car. I was horribly bruised, and half-stunned. Then he sprang in himself, and, with a dreadful explosive scream, the huge machine shot up into the air like lightning. A most villainous-looking fiend drove the engine by turning a small wheel, which set a larger one in motion. This moved a crank, which caused a complicated pendulum to oscillate, and finally drove the whole machine by setting outside fans in motion. The fans were assisted by a current of electricity, which was generated from the atmosphere in some way that I did not get to understand. The driver amused himself by mocking, and making horrible grimaces at me, when his master was looking another way. We flew at least ten thousand feet above the lake, and over an immense tract of snow-clad mountains, forests, seas, rivers, sandy deserts, and fertile valleys, through dense choking clouds, crossing several enormous ranges of mountains in our course. Away the balloon plunged with the speed of a hurricane over a howling wilderness of arid wastes, and at last, whistling like hundreds of steam pipes, hung suspended above a vast chasm in the earth which seemed about ten miles in diameter, and as black as Erebus. Into this dreadful hole the balloon descended swiftly, and I was politely commanded to get out as soon as the car touched the black charcoal floor.

Overwhelmed with astonishment and terror, I was for a time unable to make calm and accurate observations. I asked myself, in my despair, had I died beside the Great Lake, and was I really in the power of the fearful, sleepless dragon, the great enemy of mankind?

The height of the walls of this awful chasm it was impossible for me to estimate, but I knew it must be something tremedous from the appearance of the opening, which, from the spot where I stood, looked like a round hole, about as large as our full moon. The pit would have been