Page:The Independent (1905-06-01).pdf/61

Rh ing one by the other, for in the rural regions the wits think it prime fun to misdirect, and if you neglect precautions you may find yourself, when the shades of night are falling, sitting humped up in your machine fifty miles from anywhere, not knowing which way to go and using language not to be found in any of the sacred writings, while your soul writhes at the bitter thought that far, far away on his humble cot a pie-faced rustic is gloating over his own cleverness in "taking a rise out of that there city feller."

New York, May 3, 1905.



never forget the unalloyed pleasures of my first balloon ascension. Tho scarcely more than a youth, I had long dreamed of the adventure, because in those days, before the founding of the Aero Club, it was an adventure, even in Paris. Everything was still in the hands of the professional aeronauts; and its was with one of the kindest and best of these, the late M. Machuron, that I was to make my initiation. Today even ladies of Paris society, like the young Duchesse d'Uzes, think nothing of starting off from the Parc de Saint Cloud for an afternoon floating over the map of France.

It was a beautiful morning in late spring. The basket rocked coquettishly beneath the immense sphere. I stood in my corner and heard the last word given: "Let go all!"

The wind ceased. All seemed instantly motionless around us. We were off, without feeling it, at the speed of the air current in which we must live and move and have all our sensations, without having any sensation of its existence! Infinitely gentle is the unfelt movement upward and onward; the illusion is complete; it seems to be not we who move, but the earth itself that is sinking down and away from us!



In the emptiness that had already opened 1,500 yards below us, almost before I could realize it, the earth looked no longer the same. No, it did not look like an orange flattened at the Poles—we were not far enough away for that; but, by a phenomenon of refraction it showed concave like a bowl, the effect being to lift up constantly to the aeronaut's eye the circle of the horizon.

Villages and woods, chateaux and gardens slip and glide far, far below. Faint piercing sounds,