Five Weeks in a Balloon
fine trees of the east; only a few belts of half-scorched herbage still
contended against the invasion of the sand, and the huge rocks, that
had rolled down from the distant summits, crushed in their fall, had
scattered in sharp-edged pebbles which soon again became coarse sand,
and finally impalpable dust.
“Here, at last, is Africa, such as you pictured it to yourself, Joe!
Was I not right in saying, ‘Wait a little?’ eh?”
“Well, master, it’s all natural, at least—heat and dust. It would be
foolish to look for any thing else in such a country. Do you see,” he
added, laughing, “I had no confidence, for my part, in your forests and
your prairies; they were out of reason. What was the use of coming so
far to find scenery just like England? Here’s the first time that I
believe in Africa, and I’m not sorry to get a taste of it.”
Toward evening, the doctor calculated that the balloon had not made
twenty miles during that whole burning day, and a heated gloom closed
in upon it, as soon as the sun had disappeared behind the horizon,
which was traced against the sky with all the precision of a straight
line.
The next day was Thursday, the 1st of May, but the days followed each
other with desperate monotony. Each morning was like the one that had
preceded it; noon poured down the same exhaustless rays, and night
condensed in its shadow the scattered heat which the ensuing day would
again bequeath to the succeeding night. The wind, now scarcely
observable, was rather a gasp than a breath, and the morning could
almost be foreseen when even that gasp would cease.
The doctor reacted against the gloominess of the situation and retained
all the coolness and self-possession of a disciplined heart. With his
glass he scrutinized every quarter of the horizon; he saw the last
rising ground gradually melting to the dead level, and the last
vegetation disappearing, while, before him, stretched the immensity of
the desert.
The responsibility resting upon him pressed sorely, but he did not
allow his disquiet to appear. Those two men, Dick and Joe, friends of
his, both of them, he had induced to come with him almost by the force
alone of friendship and of duty. Had he done well in that? Was it not
like attempting to tread forbidden paths? Was he not, in this trip,
trying to pass the borders of the impossible? Had not the Almighty
reserved for later ages the knowledge of this inhospitable continent?
All these thoughts, of the kind that arise in hours of discouragement,
succeeded each other and multiplied in his mind, and, by an
irresistible association of ideas, the doctor allowed himself to be
carried beyond the bounds of logic and of reason. After having
established in his own mind what he should _not_ have done, the next
question was, what he should do, then. Would it be impossible to
retrace his steps? Were there not currents higher up that would waft
him to less arid regions? Well informed with regard to the countries
over which he had passed, he was utterly ignorant of those to come, and
thus his conscience speaking aloud to him, he resolved, in his turn, to
speak frankly to his two companions. He thereupon laid the whole state
of the case plainly before them; he showed them what had been done, and
what there was yet to do; at the worst, they could return, or attempt
it, at least.—What did they think about it?
“I have no other opinion than that of my excellent master,” said Joe;
“what he may have to suffer, I can suffer, and that better than he can,
perhaps. Where he goes, there I’ll go!”
“And you, Kennedy?”
“I, doctor, I’m not the man to despair; no one was less ignorant than I
of the perils of the enterprise, but I did not want to see them, from
the moment that you determined to brave them. Under present
circumstances, my opinion is, that we should persevere—go clear to the
end. Besides, to return looks to me quite as perilous as the other
course. So onward, then! you may count upon us!”
“Thanks, my gallant friends!” replied the doctor, with much real
feeling, “I expected such devotion as this; but I needed these
encouraging words. Yet, once again, thank you, from the bottom of my
heart!”
And, with this, the three friends warmly grasped each other by the
hand.
“Now, hear me!” said the doctor. “According to my solar observations,
we are not more than three hundred miles from the Gulf of Guinea; the
desert, therefore, cannot extend indefinitely, since the coast is
inhabited, and the country has been explored for some distance back
into the interior. If needs be, we can direct our course to that
quarter, and it seems out of the question that we should not come
across some oasis, or some well, where we could replenish our stock of
water. But, what we want now, is the wind, for without it we are held
here suspended in the air at a dead calm.
“Let us wait with resignation,” said the hunter.
But, each of the party, in his turn, vainly scanned the space around
him during that long wearisome day. Nothing could be seen to form the
basis of a hope. The very last inequalities of the soil disappeared
with the setting sun, whose horizontal rays stretched in long lines of
fire over the flat immensity. It was the Desert!
Our aëronauts had scarcely gone a distance of fifteen miles, having
expended, as on the preceding day, one hundred and thirty-five cubic
feet of gas to feed the cylinder, and two pints of water out of the
remaining eight had been sacrificed to the demands of intense thirst.
The night passed quietly—too quietly, indeed, but the doctor did not
sleep!
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIFTH.
A Little Philosophy.—A Cloud on the Horizon.—In the Midst of a Fog.—The
Strange Balloon.—An Exact View of the Victoria.—The Palm-Trees.—Traces
of a Caravan.—The Well in the Midst of the Desert.
On the morrow, there was the same purity of sky, the same stillness of
the atmosphere. The balloon rose to an elevation of five hundred feet,
but it had scarcely changed its position to the westward in any
perceptible degree.
“We are right in the open desert,” said the doctor. “Look at that vast
reach of sand! What a strange spectacle! What a singular arrangement of
nature! Why should there be, in one place, such extreme luxuriance of
vegetation yonder, and here, this extreme aridity, and that in the same
latitude, and under the same rays of the sun?”
“The why concerns me but little,” answered Kennedy, “the reason
interests me less than the fact. The thing is so; that’s the important
part of it!”
“Oh, it is well to philosophize a little, Dick; it does no harm.”
“Let us philosophize, then, if you will; we have time enough before us;
we are hardly moving; the wind is afraid to blow; it sleeps.”
“That will not last forever,” put in Joe; “I think I see some banks of
clouds in the east.”
“Joe’s right!” said the doctor, after he had taken a look.
“Good!” said Kennedy; “now for our clouds, with a fine rain, and a
fresh wind to dash it into our faces!”
“Well, we’ll see, Dick, we’ll see!”
“But this is Friday, master, and I’m afraid of Fridays!”
“Well, I hope that this very day you’ll get over those notions.”
“I hope so, master, too. Whew!” he added, mopping his face, “heat’s a
good thing, especially in winter, but in summer it don’t do to take too
much of it.”
“Don’t you fear the effect of the sun’s heat on our balloon?” asked
Kennedy, addressing the doctor.
“No! the gutta-percha coating resists much higher temperatures than
even this. With my spiral I have subjected it inside to as much as one
hundred and fifty-eight degrees sometimes, and the covering does not
appear to have suffered.”
“A cloud! a real cloud!” shouted Joe at this moment, for that piercing
eyesight of his beat all the glasses.
And, in fact, a thick bank of vapor, now quite distinct, could be seen
slowly emerging above the horizon. It appeared to be very deep, and, as
it were, puffed out. It was, in reality, a conglomeration of smaller
clouds. The latter invariably retained their original formation, and
from this circumstance the doctor concluded that there was no current
of air in their collected mass.
This compact body of vapor had appeared about eight o’clock in the
morning, and, by eleven, it had already reached the height of the sun’s
disk. The latter then disappeared entirely behind the murky veil, and
the lower belt of cloud, at the same moment, lifted above the line of
the horizon, which was again disclosed in a full blaze of daylight.
“It’s only an isolated cloud,” remarked the doctor. “It won’t do to
count much upon that.”
“Look, Dick, its shape is just the same as when we saw it this
morning!”
“Then, doctor, there’s to be neither rain nor wind, at least for us!”
“I fear so; the cloud keeps at a great height.”
“Well, doctor, suppose we were to go in pursuit of this cloud, since it
refuses to burst upon us?”
“I fancy that to do so wouldn’t help us much; it would be a consumption
of gas, and, consequently, of water, to little purpose; but, in our
situation, we must not leave anything untried; therefore, let us
ascend!”
And with this, the doctor put on a full head of flame from the
cylinder, and the dilation of the hydrogen, occasioned by such sudden
and intense heat, sent the balloon rapidly aloft.
About fifteen hundred feet from the ground, it encountered an opaque
mass of cloud, and entered a dense fog, suspended at that elevation;
but it did not meet with the least breath of wind. This fog seemed even
destitute of humidity, and the articles brought in contact with it were
scarcely dampened in the slightest degree. The balloon, completely
enveloped in the vapor, gained a little increase of speed, perhaps, and
that was all.
The doctor gloomily recognized what trifling success he had obtained
from his manœuvre, and was relapsing into deep meditation, when he
heard Joe exclaim, in tones of most intense astonishment:
“Ah! by all that’s beautiful!”
“What’s the matter, Joe?”
“Doctor! Mr. Kennedy! Here’s something curious!”
“What is it, then?”
“We are not alone, up here! There are rogues about! They’ve stolen our
invention!”
“Has he gone crazy?” asked Kennedy.
Joe stood there, perfectly motionless, the very picture of amazement.
“Can the hot sun have really affected the poor fellow’s brain?” said
the doctor, turning toward him.
“Will you tell me?—”
“Look!” said Joe, pointing to a certain quarter of the sky.
“By St. James!” exclaimed Kennedy, in turn, “why, who would have
believed it? Look, look! doctor!”
“I see it!” said the doctor, very quietly.
“Another balloon! and other passengers, like ourselves!”
And, sure enough, there was another balloon about two hundred paces
from them, floating in the air with its car and its aëronauts. It was
following exactly the same route as the _Victoria_.
“Well,” said the doctor, “nothing remains for us but to make signals;
take the flag, Kennedy, and show them our colors.”
It seemed that the travellers by the other balloon had just the same
idea, at the same moment, for the same kind of flag repeated precisely
the same salute with a hand that moved in just the same manner.
“What does that mean?” asked Kennedy.
“They are apes,” said Joe, “imitating us.”
“It means,” said the doctor, laughing, “that it is you, Dick, yourself,
making that signal to yourself; or, in other words, that we see
ourselves in the second balloon, which is no other than the
_Victoria_.”
“As to that, master, with all respect to you,” said Joe, “you’ll never
make me believe it.”
“Climb up on the edge of the car, Joe; wave your arms, and then you’ll
see.”
Joe obeyed, and all his gestures were instantaneously and exactly
repeated.
“It is merely the effect of the _mirage_,” said the doctor, “and