The Daily Phoenix

In the valley of the Rhone, August, just after noon, the balloon rose in the air at the foot of the Jura Hills, on the western edge of the little plain of England. It was inflated in the lightest of gases which chemistry could produce, and it rose with surprising velocity. A mile up and it entered a stratum of cloud more than a thousand feet thick. Emerging from it, the sun shone brightly on the air; the sky overhead was of the clearest and deepest blue, and below lay cloud-land, an immeasurable expanse of white, whose surface looked as solid as that of the earth, not wholly lost to view. Lofty mountains, and deep, dark ravines, appeared below, the peak and sides of gigantic mountains next to the sun, glittering like snow, but casting shadows as if they were solid rock. Uprose the balloon with tremendous velocity. Four leagues above the earth a pigeon was loosed; it dropped down as if it was a stone. The air was too thin to enable it to fly. It fell as if a barque laden to the deck were passing from the heavy waters of the sea to an inland unsaline lake; the barque would sink at once in the thinner water. Up, up, still higher! What a silence profound! The heights of the sky were as still as the deepest depths of the ocean, where, as we found during the search for the last Atlantic cable, the mud lies unstirred from year to year as the dust which imperceptibly gathers on the furniture of a deserted house. No sound, no life, only the bright sunshine falling through a sky it could not warm. Up, miles above the earth—higher than the inaccessible summit of Chimborazo or Dhavalgiri. Despite the sunshine, everything freezes. The air grows too thin to support life, even for a few minutes. Two men only are in that adventurous balloon—the one steering the ship, the other watching the scientific instruments, and recording them with rapidity of long practice. Suddenly, as the latter looks at his instrument, his sight grows dim; he takes a lens to help his sight, and only marks from the falling barometer that they are testing perilously high. A decanter of old brandy lies within a foot of him; he tries to reach it, but his fingers do not obey his will. He tries to call on his comrade, who has gone up in the rigging above: a whisper in that deep silence would suffice—but no sound comes from his lips—he is voiceless. The steersman comes down in the car; he sees his comrade in a swoon, and he feels his own sense failing him. He saw at once that life hung upon a few moments. He seized, or tried to seize, the valve, in order to let out the gas. He seized the valve with his teeth, it opened a little—once, twice, thrice. The balloon began to descend. Then the swooned man returned to consciousness and saw the steersman standing before him. He looked at his instruments; but now the barometer was rising rapidly; the balloon was descending. Brandy was used. They had been higher above the earth than mortal man or any living thing had ever been before. One minute more of inaction—of compulsory inaction—on the part of a steersman whose senses were failing him, and the air-ship, with its intensely rarefied gas, would have been floating unattended, with two corpses in the wide realm of space.