Five Weeks in a Balloon
nothing else—a simple optical phenomenon due to the unequal refraction
of light by different layers of the atmosphere, and that is all.
“It’s wonderful,” said Joe, who could not make up his mind to
surrender, but went on repeating his gesticulations.
“What a curious sight! Do you know,” said Kennedy, “that it’s a real
pleasure to have a view of our noble balloon in that style? She’s a
beauty, isn’t she?—and how stately her movements as she sweeps along!”
“You may explain the matter as you like,” continued Joe, “it’s a
strange thing, anyhow!”
But ere long this picture began to fade away; the clouds rose higher,
leaving the balloon, which made no further attempt to follow them, and
in about an hour they disappeared in the open sky.
The wind, which had been scarcely perceptible, seemed still to
diminish, and the doctor in perfect desperation descended toward the
ground, and all three of the travellers, whom the incident just
recorded had, for a few moments, diverted from their anxieties,
relapsed into gloomy meditation, sweltering the while beneath the
scorching heat.
About four o’clock, Joe descried some object standing out against the
vast background of sand, and soon was able to declare positively that
there were two palm-trees at no great distance.
“Palm-trees!” exclaimed Ferguson; “why, then there’s a spring—a well!”
He took up his glass and satisfied himself that Joe’s eyes had not been
mistaken.
“At length!” he said, over and over again, “water! water! and we are
saved; for if we do move slowly, still we move, and we shall arrive at
last!”
“Good, master! but suppose we were to drink a mouthful in the mean
time, for this air is stifling?”
“Let us drink then, my boy!”
No one waited to be coaxed. A whole pint was swallowed then and there,
reducing the total remaining supply to three pints and a half.
“Ah! that does one good!” said Joe; “wasn’t it fine? Barclay and
Perkins never turned out ale equal to that!”
“See the advantage of being put on short allowance!” moralized the
doctor.
“It is not great, after all,” retorted Kennedy; “and if I were never
again to have the pleasure of drinking water, I should agree on
condition that I should never be deprived of it.”
At six o’clock the balloon was floating over the palm-trees.
They were two shrivelled, stunted, dried-up specimens of trees—two
ghosts of palms—without foliage, and more dead than alive. Ferguson
examined them with terror.
At their feet could be seen the half-worn stones of a spring, but these
stones, pulverized by the baking heat of the sun, seemed to be nothing
now but impalpable dust. There was not the slightest sign of moisture.
The doctor’s heart shrank within him, and he was about to communicate
his thoughts to his companions, when their exclamations attracted his
attention. As far as the eye could reach to the eastward, extended a
long line of whitened bones; pieces of skeletons surrounded the
fountain; a caravan had evidently made its way to that point, marking
its progress by its bleaching remains; the weaker had fallen one by one
upon the sand; the stronger, having at length reached this spring for
which they panted, had there found a horrible death.
Our travellers looked at each other and turned pale.
“Let us not alight!” said Kennedy, “let us fly from this hideous
spectacle! There’s not a drop of water here!”
“No, Dick, as well pass the night here as elsewhere; let us have a
clear conscience in the matter. We’ll dig down to the very bottom of
the well. There has been a spring here, and perhaps there’s something
left in it!”
The _Victoria_ touched the ground; Joe and Kennedy put into the car a
quantity of sand equal to their weight, and leaped out. They then
hastened to the well, and penetrated to the interior by a flight of
steps that was now nothing but dust. The spring appeared to have been
dry for years. They dug down into a parched and powdery sand—the very
dryest of all sand, indeed—there was not one trace of moisture!
The doctor saw them come up to the surface of the desert, saturated
with perspiration, worn out, covered with fine dust, exhausted,
discouraged and despairing.
He then comprehended that their search had been fruitless. He had
expected as much, and he kept silent, for he felt that, from this
moment forth, he must have courage and energy enough for three.
Joe brought up with him some pieces of a leathern bottle that had grown
hard and horn-like with age, and angrily flung them away among the
bleaching bones of the caravan.
At supper, not a word was spoken by our travellers, and they even ate
without appetite. Yet they had not, up to this moment, endured the real
agonies of thirst, and were in no desponding mood, excepting for the
future.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIXTH.
One Hundred and Thirteen Degrees.—The Doctor’s Reflections.—A Desperate
Search.—The Cylinder goes out.—One Hundred and Twenty-two
Degrees.—Contemplation of the Desert.—A Night
Walk.—Solitude.—Debility.—Joe’s Prospects.—He gives himself One Day
more.
The distance made by the balloon during the preceding day did not
exceed ten miles, and, to keep it afloat, one hundred and sixty-two
cubic feet of gas had been consumed.
On Saturday morning the doctor again gave the signal for departure.
“The cylinder can work only six hours longer; and, if in that time we
shall not have found either a well or a spring of water, God alone
knows what will become of us!”
“Not much wind this morning, master,” said Joe; “but it will come up,
perhaps,” he added, suddenly remarking the doctor’s ill-concealed
depression.
Vain hope! The atmosphere was in a dead calm—one of those calms which
hold vessels captive in tropical seas. The heat had become intolerable;
and the thermometer, in the shade under the awning, indicated one
hundred and thirteen degrees.
Joe and Kennedy, reclining at full length near each other, tried, if
not in slumber, at least in torpor, to forget their situation, for
their forced inactivity gave them periods of leisure far from pleasant.
That man is to be pitied the most who cannot wean himself from gloomy
reflections by actual work, or some practical pursuit. But here there
was nothing to look after, nothing to undertake, and they had to submit
to the situation, without having it in their power to ameliorate it.
The pangs of thirst began to be severely felt; brandy, far from
appeasing this imperious necessity, augmented it, and richly merited
the name of “tiger’s milk” applied to it by the African natives.
Scarcely two pints of water remained, and that was heated. Each of the
party devoured the few precious drops with his gaze, yet neither of
them dared to moisten his lips with them. Two pints of water in the
midst of the desert!
Then it was that Dr. Ferguson, buried in meditation, asked himself
whether he had acted with prudence. Would he not have done better to
have kept the water that he had decomposed in pure loss, in order to
sustain him in the air? He had gained a little distance, to be sure;
but was he any nearer to his journey’s end? What difference did sixty
miles to the rear make in this region, when there was no water to be
had where they were? The wind, should it rise, would blow there as it
did here, only less strongly at this point, if it came from the east.
But hope urged him onward. And yet those two gallons of water, expended
in vain, would have sufficed for nine days’ halt in the desert. And
what changes might not have occurred in nine days! Perhaps, too, while
retaining the water, he might have ascended by throwing out ballast, at
the cost merely of discharging some gas, when he had again to descend.
But the gas in his balloon was his blood, his very life!
A thousand one such reflections whirled in succession through his
brain; and, resting his head between his hands, he sat there for hours
without raising it.
“We must make one final effort,” he said, at last, about ten o’clock in
the morning. “We must endeavor, just once more, to find an atmospheric
current to bear us away from here, and, to that end, must risk our last
resources.”
Therefore, while his companions slept, the doctor raised the hydrogen
in the balloon to an elevated temperature, and the huge globe, filling
out by the dilation of the gas, rose straight up in the perpendicular
rays of the sun. The doctor searched vainly for a breath of wind, from
the height of one hundred feet to that of five miles; his
starting-point remained fatally right below him, and absolute calm
seemed to reign, up to the extreme limits of the breathing atmosphere.
At length the feeding-supply of water gave out; the cylinder was
extinguished for lack of gas; the Buntzen battery ceased to work, and
the balloon, shrinking together, gently descended to the sand, in the
very place that the car had hollowed out there.
It was noon; and solar observations gave nineteen degrees thirty-five
minutes east longitude, and six degrees fifty-one minutes north
latitude, or nearly five hundred miles from Lake Tchad, and more than
four hundred miles from the western coast of Africa.
On the balloon taking ground, Kennedy and Joe awoke from their stupor.
“We have halted,” said the Scot.
“We had to do so,” replied the doctor, gravely.
His companions understood him. The level of the soil at that point
corresponded with the level of the sea, and, consequently, the balloon
remained in perfect equilibrium, and absolutely motionless.
The weight of the three travellers was replaced with an equivalent
quantity of sand, and they got out of the car. Each was absorbed in his
own thoughts; and for many hours neither of them spoke. Joe prepared
their evening meal, which consisted of biscuit and pemmican, and was
hardly tasted by either of the party. A mouthful of scalding water from
their little store completed this gloomy repast.
During the night none of them kept awake; yet none could be precisely
said to have slept. On the morrow there remained only half a pint of
water, and this the doctor put away, all three having resolved not to
touch it until the last extremity.
It was not long, however, before Joe exclaimed:
“I’m choking, and the heat is getting worse! I’m not surprised at that,
though,” he added, consulting the thermometer; “one hundred and forty
degrees!”
“The sand scorches me,” said the hunter, “as though it had just come
out of a furnace; and not a cloud in this sky of fire. It’s enough to
drive one mad!”
“Let us not despair,” responded the doctor. “In this latitude these
intense heats are invariably followed by storms, and the latter come
with the suddenness of lightning. Notwithstanding this disheartening
clearness of the sky, great atmospheric changes may take place in less
than an hour.”
“But,” asked Kennedy, “is there any sign whatever of that?”
“Well,” replied the doctor, “I think that there is some slight symptom
of a fall in the barometer.”
“May Heaven hearken to you, Samuel! for here we are pinned to the
ground, like a bird with broken wings.”
“With this difference, however, my dear Dick, that our wings are
unhurt, and I hope that we shall be able to use them again.”
“Ah! wind! wind!” exclaimed Joe; “enough to carry us to a stream or a
well, and we’ll be all right. We have provisions enough, and, with
water, we could wait a month without suffering; but thirst is a cruel
thing!”
It was not thirst alone, but the unchanging sight of the desert, that
fatigued the mind. There was not a variation in the surface of the
soil, not a hillock of sand, not a pebble, to relieve the gaze. This
unbroken level discouraged the beholder, and gave him that kind of
malady called the “desert-sickness.” The impassible monotony of the
arid blue sky, and the vast yellow expanse of the desert-sand, at