Five Weeks in a Balloon
“We must let him know it by firing a gun!”
“No! he can’t turn back to come this way. He’s headed off!”
“What shall we do, then?”
“We must wait.”
“Wait?—and these Arabs!”
“We shall overtake them. We’ll pass them. We are not more than two
miles from them, and provided that Joe’s horse holds out!”
“Great God!” exclaimed Kennedy, suddenly.
“What is the matter?”
Kennedy had uttered a cry of despair as he saw Joe fling himself to the
ground. His horse, evidently exhausted, had just fallen headlong.
“He sees us!” cried the doctor, “and he motions to us, as he gets upon
his feet!”
“But the Arabs will overtake him! What is he waiting for? Ah! the brave
lad! Huzza!” shouted the sportsman, who could no longer restrain his
feelings.
Joe, who had immediately sprung up after his fall, just as one of the
swiftest horsemen rushed upon him, bounded like a panther, avoided his
assailant by leaping to one side, jumped up behind him on the crupper,
seized the Arab by the throat, and, strangling him with his sinewy
hands and fingers of steel, flung him on the sand, and continued his
headlong flight.
A tremendous howl was heard from the Arabs, but, completely engrossed
by the pursuit, they had not taken notice of the balloon, which was now
but five hundred paces behind them, and only about thirty feet from the
ground. On their part, they were not twenty lengths of their horses
from the fugitive.
One of them was very perceptibly gaining on Joe, and was about to
pierce him with his lance, when Kennedy, with fixed eye and steady
hand, stopped him short with a ball, that hurled him to the earth.
Joe did not even turn his head at the report. Some of the horsemen
reined in their barbs, and fell on their faces in the dust as they
caught sight of the _Victoria;_ the rest continued their pursuit.
“But what is Joe about?” said Kennedy; “he don’t stop!”
“He’s doing better than that, Dick! I understand him! He’s keeping on
in the same direction as the balloon. He relies upon our intelligence.
Ah! the noble fellow! We’ll carry him off in the very teeth of those
Arab rascals! We are not more than two hundred paces from him!”
“What are we to do?” asked Kennedy.
“Lay aside your rifle, Dick.”
And the Scot obeyed the request at once.
“Do you think that you can hold one hundred and fifty pounds of ballast
in your arms?”
“Ay, more than that!”
“No! That will be enough!”
And the doctor proceeded to pile up bags of sand in Kennedy’s arms.
“Hold yourself in readiness in the back part of the car, and be
prepared to throw out that ballast at a single effort. But, for your
life, don’t do so until I give the word!”
“Be easy on that point.”
“Otherwise, we should miss Joe, and he would be lost.”
“Count upon me!”
The _Victoria_ at that moment almost commanded the troop of horsemen
who were still desperately urging their steeds at Joe’s heels. The
doctor, standing in the front of the car, held the ladder clear, ready
to throw it at any moment. Meanwhile, Joe had still maintained the
distance between himself and his pursuers—say about fifty feet. The
_Victoria_ was now ahead of the party.
“Attention!” exclaimed the doctor to Kennedy.
“I’m ready!”
“Joe, look out for yourself!” shouted the doctor in his sonorous,
ringing voice, as he flung out the ladder, the lowest ratlines of which
tossed up the dust of the road.
As the doctor shouted, Joe had turned his head, but without checking
his horse. The ladder dropped close to him, and at the instant he
grasped it the doctor again shouted to Kennedy:
“Throw ballast!”
“It’s done!”
And the _Victoria_, lightened by a weight greater than Joe’s, shot up
one hundred and fifty feet into the air.
Joe clung with all his strength to the ladder during the wide
oscillations that it had to describe, and then making an indescribable
gesture to the Arabs, and climbing with the agility of a monkey, he
sprang up to his companions, who received him with open arms.
The Arabs uttered a scream of astonishment and rage. The fugitive had
been snatched from them on the wing, and the _Victoria_ was rapidly
speeding far beyond their reach.
“Master! Kennedy!” ejaculated Joe, and overwhelmed, at last, with
fatigue and emotion, the poor fellow fainted away, while Kennedy,
almost beside himself, kept exclaiming:
“Saved—saved!”
“Saved indeed!” murmured the doctor, who had recovered all his
phlegmatic coolness.
Joe was almost naked. His bleeding arms, his body covered with cuts and
bruises, told what his sufferings had been. The doctor quietly dressed
his wounds, and laid him comfortably under the awning.
Joe soon returned to consciousness, and asked for a glass of brandy,
which the doctor did not see fit to refuse, as the faithful fellow had
to be indulged.
After he had swallowed the stimulant, Joe grasped the hands of his two
friends and announced that he was ready to relate what had happened to
him.
But they would not allow him to talk at that time, and he sank back
into a profound sleep, of which he seemed to have the greatest possible
need.
The _Victoria_ was then taking an oblique line to the westward. Driven
by a tempestuous wind, it again approached the borders of the thorny
desert, which the travellers descried over the tops of palm-trees, bent
and broken by the storm; and, after having made a run of two hundred
miles since rescuing Joe, it passed the tenth degree of east longitude
about nightfall.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVENTH.
The Western Route.—Joe wakes up.—His Obstinacy.—End of Joe’s
Narrative.—Tagelei.—Kennedy’s Anxieties.—The Route to the North.—A
Night near Aghades.
During the night the wind lulled as though reposing after the
boisterousness of the day, and the _Victoria_ remained quietly at the
top of the tall sycamore. The doctor and Kennedy kept watch by turns,
and Joe availed himself of the chance to sleep most sturdily for
twenty-four hours at a stretch.
“That’s the remedy he needs,” said Dr. Ferguson. “Nature will take
charge of his care.”
With the dawn the wind sprang up again in quite strong, and moreover
capricious gusts. It shifted abruptly from south to north, but finally
the _Victoria_ was carried away by it toward the west.
The doctor, map in hand, recognized the kingdom of Damerghou, an
undulating region of great fertility, in which the huts that compose
the villages are constructed of long reeds interwoven with branches of
the _asclepia_. The grain-mills were seen raised in the cultivated
fields, upon small scaffoldings or platforms, to keep them out of the
reach of the mice and the huge ants of that country.
They soon passed the town of Zinder, recognized by its spacious place
of execution, in the centre of which stands the “tree of death.” At its
foot the executioner stands waiting, and whoever passes beneath its
shadow is immediately hung!
Upon consulting his compass, Kennedy could not refrain from saying:
“Look! we are again moving northward.”
“No matter; if it only takes us to Timbuctoo, we shall not complain.
Never was a finer voyage accomplished under better circumstances!”
“Nor in better health,” said Joe, at that instant thrusting his jolly
countenance from between the curtains of the awning.
“There he is! there’s our gallant friend—our preserver!” exclaimed
Kennedy, cordially.—“How goes it, Joe?”
“Oh! why, naturally enough, Mr. Kennedy, very naturally! I never felt
better in my life! Nothing sets a man up like a little pleasure-trip
with a bath in Lake Tchad to start on—eh, doctor?”
“Brave fellow!” said Ferguson, pressing Joe’s hand, “what terrible
anxiety you caused us!”
“Humph! and you, sir? Do you think that I felt easy in my mind about
you, gentlemen? You gave me a fine fright, let me tell you!”
“We shall never agree in the world, Joe, if you take things in that
style.”
“I see that his tumble hasn’t changed him a bit,” added Kennedy.
“Your devotion and self-forgetfulness were sublime, my brave lad, and
they saved us, for the _Victoria_ was falling into the lake, and, once
there, nobody could have extricated her.”
“But, if my devotion, as you are pleased to call my summerset, saved
you, did it not save me too, for here we are, all three of us, in
first-rate health? Consequently we have nothing to squabble about in
the whole affair.”
“Oh! we can never come to a settlement with that youth,” said the
sportsman.
“The best way to settle it,” replied Joe, “is to say nothing more about
the matter. What’s done is done. Good or bad, we can’t take it back.”
“You obstinate fellow!” said the doctor, laughing; “you can’t refuse,
though, to tell us your adventures, at all events.”
“Not if you think it worth while. But, in the first place, I’m going to
cook this fat goose to a turn, for I see that Mr. Kennedy has not
wasted his time.”
“All right, Joe!”
“Well, let us see then how this African game will sit on a European
stomach!”
The goose was soon roasted by the flame of the blow-pipe, and not long
afterward was comfortably stowed away. Joe took his own good share,
like a man who had eaten nothing for several days. After the tea and
the punch, he acquainted his friends with his recent adventures. He
spoke with some emotion, even while looking at things with his usual
philosophy. The doctor could not refrain from frequently pressing his
hand when he saw his worthy servant more considerate of his master’s
safety than of his own, and, in relation to the sinking of the island
of the Biddiomahs, he explained to him the frequency of this phenomenon
upon Lake Tchad.
At length Joe, continuing his recital, arrived at the point where,
sinking in the swamp, he had uttered a last cry of despair.
“I thought I was gone,” said he, “and as you came right into my mind, I
made a hard fight for it. How, I couldn’t tell you—but I’d made up my
mind that I wouldn’t go under without knowing why. Just then, I saw—two
or three feet from me—what do you think? the end of a rope that had
been fresh cut; so I took leave to make another jerk, and, by hook or
by crook, I got to the rope. When I pulled, it didn’t give; so I pulled
again and hauled away and there I was on dry ground! At the end of the
rope, I found an anchor! Ah, master, I’ve a right to call that the
anchor of safety, anyhow, if you have no objection. I knew it again! It
was the anchor of the _Victoria!_ You had grounded there! So I followed
the direction of the rope and that gave me your direction, and, after
trying hard a few times more, I got out of the swamp. I had got my
strength back with my spunk, and I walked on part of the night away
from the lake, until I got to the edge of a very big wood. There I saw
a fenced-in place, where some horses were grazing, without thinking of
any harm. Now, there are times when everybody knows how to ride a
horse, are there not, doctor? So I didn’t spend much time thinking
about it, but jumped right on the back of one of those innocent animals
and away we went galloping north as fast as our legs could carry us. I
needn’t tell you about the towns that I didn’t see nor the villages
that I took good care to go around. No! I crossed the ploughed fields;
I leaped the hedges; I scrambled over the fences; I dug my heels into
my nag; I thrashed him; I fairly lifted the poor fellow off his feet!
At last I got to the end of the tilled land. Good! There was the
desert. ‘That suits me!’ said I, ‘for I can see better ahead of me and
farther too.’ I was hoping all the time to see the balloon tacking
about and waiting for me. But not a bit of it; and so, in about three
hours, I go plump, like a fool, into a camp of Arabs! Whew! what a hunt
that was! You see, Mr. Kennedy, a hunter don’t know what a real hunt is