Five Weeks in a Balloon
themselves upon young and vigorous Europe, which has nourished them for
the last two thousand years. But already her fertility is beginning to
die out; her productive powers are diminishing every day. Those new
diseases that annually attack the products of the soil, those defective
crops, those insufficient resources, are all signs of a vitality that
is rapidly wearing out and of an approaching exhaustion. Thus, we
already see the millions rushing to the luxuriant bosom of America, as
a source of help, not inexhaustible indeed, but not yet exhausted. In
its turn, that new continent will grow old; its virgin forests will
fall before the axe of industry, and its soil will become weak through
having too fully produced what had been demanded of it. Where two
harvests bloomed every year, hardly one will be gathered from a soil
completely drained of its strength. Then, Africa will be there to offer
to new races the treasures that for centuries have been accumulating in
her breast. Those climates now so fatal to strangers will be purified
by cultivation and by drainage of the soil, and those scattered water
supplies will be gathered into one common bed to form an artery of
navigation. Then this country over which we are now passing, more
fertile, richer, and fuller of vitality than the rest, will become some
grand realm where more astonishing discoveries than steam and
electricity will be brought to light.”
“Ah! sir,” said Joe, “I’d like to see all that.”
“You got up too early in the morning, my boy!”
“Besides,” said Kennedy, “that may prove to be a very dull period when
industry will swallow up every thing for its own profit. By dint of
inventing machinery, men will end in being eaten up by it! I have
always fancied that the end of the earth will be when some enormous
boiler, heated to three thousand millions of atmospheric pressure,
shall explode and blow up our Globe!”
“And I add that the Americans,” said Joe, “will not have been the last
to work at the machine!”
“In fact,” assented the doctor, “they are great boiler-makers! But,
without allowing ourselves to be carried away by such speculations, let
us rest content with enjoying the beauties of this country of the Moon,
since we have been permitted to see it.”
The sun, darting his last rays beneath the masses of heaped-up cloud,
adorned with a crest of gold the slightest inequalities of the ground
below; gigantic trees, arborescent bushes, mosses on the even
surface—all had their share of this luminous effulgence. The soil,
slightly undulating, here and there rose into little conical hills;
there were no mountains visible on the horizon; immense brambly
palisades, impenetrable hedges of thorny jungle, separated the
clearings dotted with numerous villages, and immense euphorbiae
surrounded them with natural fortifications, interlacing their trunks
with the coral-shaped branches of the shrubbery and undergrowth.
Ere long, the Malagazeri, the chief tributary of Lake Tanganayika, was
seen winding between heavy thickets of verdure, offering an asylum to
many water-courses that spring from the torrents formed in the season
of freshets, or from ponds hollowed in the clayey soil. To observers
looking from a height, it was a chain of waterfalls thrown across the
whole western face of the country.
Animals with huge humps were feeding in the luxuriant prairies, and
were half hidden, sometimes, in the tall grass; spreading forests in
bloom redolent of spicy perfumes presented themselves to the gaze like
immense bouquets; but, in these bouquets, lions, leopards, hyenas, and
tigers, were then crouching for shelter from the last hot rays of the
setting sun. From time to time, an elephant made the tall tops of the
undergrowth sway to and fro, and you could hear the crackling of huge
branches as his ponderous ivory tusks broke them in his way.
“What a sporting country!” exclaimed Dick, unable longer to restrain
his enthusiasm; “why, a single ball fired at random into those forests
would bring down game worthy of it. Suppose we try it once!”
“No, my dear Dick; the night is close at hand—a threatening night with
a tempest in the background—and the storms are awful in this country,
where the heated soil is like one vast electric battery.”
“You are right, sir,” said Joe, “the heat has got to be enough to choke
one, and the breeze has died away. One can feel that something’s
coming.”
“The atmosphere is saturated with electricity,” replied the doctor;
“every living creature is sensible that this state of the air portends
a struggle of the elements, and I confess that I never before was so
full of the fluid myself.”
“Well, then,” suggested Dick, “would it not be advisable to alight?”
“On the contrary, Dick, I’d rather go up, only that I am afraid of
being carried out of my course by these counter-currents contending in
the atmosphere.”
“Have you any idea, then, of abandoning the route that we have followed
since we left the coast?”
“If I can manage to do so,” replied the doctor, “I will turn more
directly northward, by from seven to eight degrees; I shall then
endeavor to ascend toward the presumed latitudes of the sources of the
Nile; perhaps we may discover some traces of Captain Speke’s expedition
or of M. de Heuglin’s caravan. Unless I am mistaken, we are at
thirty-two degrees forty minutes east longitude, and I should like to
ascend directly north of the equator.”
“Look there!” exclaimed Kennedy, suddenly, “see those hippopotami
sliding out of the pools—those masses of blood-colored flesh—and those
crocodiles snuffing the air aloud!”
“They’re choking!” ejaculated Joe. “Ah! what a fine way to travel this
is; and how one can snap his fingers at all that vermin!—Doctor! Mr.
Kennedy! see those packs of wild animals hurrying along close together.
There are fully two hundred. Those are wolves.”
“No! Joe, not wolves, but wild dogs; a famous breed that does not
hesitate to attack the lion himself. They are the worst customers a
traveller could meet, for they would instantly tear him to pieces.”
“Well, it isn’t Joe that’ll undertake to muzzle them!” responded that
amiable youth. “After all, though, if that’s the nature of the beast,
we mustn’t be too hard on them for it!”
Silence gradually settled down under the influence of the impending
storm: the thickened air actually seemed no longer adapted to the
transmission of sound; the atmosphere appeared _muffled_, and, like a
room hung with tapestry, lost all its sonorous reverberation. The
“rover bird” so-called, the coroneted crane, the red and blue jays, the
mocking-bird, the flycatcher, disappeared among the foliage of the
immense trees, and all nature revealed symptoms of some approaching
catastrophe.
At nine o’clock the _Victoria_ hung motionless over Msene, an extensive
group of villages scarcely distinguishable in the gloom. Once in a
while, the reflection of a wandering ray of light in the dull water
disclosed a succession of ditches regularly arranged, and, by one last
gleam, the eye could make out the calm and sombre forms of palm-trees,
sycamores, and gigantic euphorbiae.
“I am stifling!” said the Scot, inhaling, with all the power of his
lungs, as much as possible of the rarefied air. “We are not moving an
inch! Let us descend!”
“But the tempest!” said the doctor, with much uneasiness.
“If you are afraid of being carried away by the wind, it seems to me
that there is no other course to pursue.”
“Perhaps the storm won’t burst to-night,” said Joe; “the clouds are
very high.”
“That is just the thing that makes me hesitate about going beyond them;
we should have to rise still higher, lose sight of the earth, and not
know all night whether we were moving forward or not, or in what
direction we were going.”
“Make up your mind, dear doctor, for time presses!”
“It’s a pity that the wind has fallen,” said Joe, again; “it would have
carried us clear of the storm.”
“It is, indeed, a pity, my friends,” rejoined the doctor. “The clouds
are dangerous for us; they contain opposing currents which might catch
us in their eddies, and lightnings that might set on fire. Again, those
perils avoided, the force of the tempest might hurl us to the ground,
were we to cast our anchor in the tree-tops.”
“Then what shall we do?”
“Well, we must try to get the balloon into a medium zone of the
atmosphere, and there keep her suspended between the perils of the
heavens and those of the earth. We have enough water for the cylinder,
and our two hundred pounds of ballast are untouched. In case of
emergency I can use them.”
“We will keep watch with you,” said the hunter.
“No, my friends, put the provisions under shelter, and lie down; I will
rouse you, if it becomes necessary.”
“But, master, wouldn’t you do well to take some rest yourself, as
there’s no danger close on us just now?” insisted poor Joe.
“No, thank you, my good fellow, I prefer to keep awake. We are not
moving, and should circumstances not change, we’ll find ourselves
to-morrow in exactly the same place.”
“Good-night, then, sir!”
“Good-night, if you can only find it so!”
Kennedy and Joe stretched themselves out under their blankets, and the
doctor remained alone in the immensity of space.
However, the huge dome of clouds visibly descended, and the darkness
became profound. The black vault closed in upon the earth as if to
crush it in its embrace.
All at once a violent, rapid, incisive flash of lightning pierced the
gloom, and the rent it made had not closed ere a frightful clap of
thunder shook the celestial depths.
“Up! up! turn out!” shouted Ferguson.
The two sleepers, aroused by the terrible concussion, were at the
doctor’s orders in a moment.
“Shall we descend?” said Kennedy.
“No! the balloon could not stand it. Let us go up before those clouds
dissolve in water, and the wind is let loose!” and, so saying, the
doctor actively stirred up the flame of the cylinder, and turned it on
the spirals of the serpentine siphon.
The tempests of the tropics develop with a rapidity equalled only by
their violence. A second flash of lightning rent the darkness, and was
followed by a score of others in quick succession. The sky was crossed
and dotted, like the zebra’s hide, with electric sparks, which danced
and flickered beneath the great drops of rain.
“We have delayed too long,” exclaimed the doctor; “we must now pass
through a zone of fire, with our balloon filled as it is with
inflammable gas!”
“But let us descend, then! let us descend!” urged Kennedy.
“The risk of being struck would be just about even, and we should soon
be torn to pieces by the branches of the trees!”
“We are going up, doctor!”
“Quicker, quicker still!”
In this part of Africa, during the equatorial storms, it is not rare to
count from thirty to thirty-five flashes of lightning per minute. The
sky is literally on fire, and the crashes of thunder are continuous.
The wind burst forth with frightful violence in this burning
atmosphere; it twisted the blazing clouds; one might have compared it
to the breath of some gigantic bellows, fanning all this conflagration.
Dr. Ferguson kept his cylinder at full heat, and the balloon dilated
and went up, while Kennedy, on his knees, held together the curtains of
the awning. The balloon whirled round wildly enough to make their heads
turn, and the aëronauts got some very alarming jolts, indeed, as their
machine swung and swayed in all directions. Huge cavities would form in
the silk of the balloon as the wind fiercely bent it in, and the stuff
fairly cracked like a pistol as it flew back from the pressure. A sort
of hail, preceded by a rumbling noise, hissed through the air and
rattled on the covering of the _Victoria_. The latter, however,