IN THE CLOUDS.
“How fearful
And dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low!
... I’ll look no more
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong!”
SHAKSPEARE.
“Oh, how delightful!” was the first exclamation of Mabel, as the
_Eaglet_ shot upwards, swiftly, but with a motion so smooth that its
speed was only made known by the earth and the spectators appearing to
sink down—down—ever growing less and less, while the cheers sounded
fainter and fainter, as rising up from a distance. “How delightful!” she
repeated, waving a little flag as her farewell to those below.
But when the smiling Mabel turned to look at her companions, she was
somewhat startled to mark that the countenance of her uncle was of the
same ashen hue as that of the earl.
“How is it that Mr. Verdon is not with us?” exclaimed Mabel in some
surprise.
Augustine silenced her by a warning look. His grasp on the arm of
Dashleigh had grown heavier and tighter; but for that grasp it is
possible that the nobleman, in the first excitement of fear, would
have flung himself out of the car. Augustine’s first thought was for
his companion, for he felt that the unhappy Dashleigh was trembling
convulsively under his hand.
“Well, my friends,” said he, in a tone so cheerful that it completely
deceived his niece; “Verdon will think it a shame if we do not go back
for him directly; I propose, therefore, that we descend.”
“Yes, descend!” cried Dashleigh wildly; and a strange faint echo from the
far earth repeated the word, “Descend!”
Augustine was almost afraid to loosen his hold on the arm of the earl;
it was, however, necessary that he should try some means of bringing the
_Eaglet_ to the ground. He was, of course, aware that this means must be
to let out the gas which inflated the ball, but ignorant as he was of
the practical working of a balloon, however easily he might grasp its
theory, Augustine was left to guess the way in which this effect might be
produced. Mabel, who had perfect confidence in the power of her gifted
uncle to master any difficulty, and who saw no change in his countenance
except the paleness which overspread his handsome features, had no idea
of the anxious fear which now perplexed his mind.
Augustine laid hold of a rope which seemed to him to be the one most
probably attached to the valve at the top of the ball, and in this his
reason had not misled him. The valve was constructed to open inwardly,
so that the pressure of the gas within might keep it constantly closed,
except when mechanical means were applied to counteract that pressure.
But Mr. Verdon’s misgiving had not been without foundation; there was
some hitch with the valve which prevented its working properly under an
inexperienced hand. As Augustine pulled the rope, the balloon entered
into a cloud, and the travellers suddenly found themselves enveloped in a
dense, damp, chilly mist.
“Are we ascending or descending?” asked Mabel, “for the balloon is so
steady that it does not seem to be moving at all.”
Her uncle, who, with far greater anxiety, had been asking himself the
same question, replied in a voice still perfectly calm, “throw down some
pieces of paper, and we shall ascertain that fact directly.”
Wondering that he should not know it without having recourse to
experiment, Mabel immediately obeyed. “The bits seem to fall, not like
paper, but like lead!” she exclaimed.
“Then we must be ascending rapidly still,” muttered Augustine; and he
pulled the rope with such desperate force that it snapped in his hand,
and all communication with the all-important valve was broken off for
ever.
“God have mercy upon us!” was Augustine’s instinctive prayer, not
uttered aloud from the fear of alarming his companions. The thick mist
prevented Mabel from having any clear idea of what her uncle was doing,
but she thought him strangely silent, and a damping chill came over her
young spirit like the fog which enwrapped her form. Augustine looked up
almost in despair at the huge indistinct mass looming as a dark cloud
above him. Oh! that there were but any means of tearing open a passage
for the gas! The wicker car, suspended by ropes, hung too low beneath the
ball for it to be possible for Aumerle’s extended arm to reach the silken
globe, or his penknife would have at once offered an easy solution of the
difficulty. A light, agile sea-boy might possibly have climbed one of the
ropes, and so have reached the inflated ball; but the brain of Augustine
turned dizzy at the very thought of attempting to clamber at the awful
height to which he knew that he must now have attained. His frame was
remarkable for strength as well as for manly beauty, but was altogether
unfitted for a perilous feat like this. To have attempted it must have
been inevitably to fall and perish.
Suddenly, to Mabel’s relief, the balloon emerged from its misty shroud,
and burst again into the brightness of day. The scene was one never to be
forgotten, but Mabel was the only one of the travellers whose mind was
sufficiently at ease to enjoy its sublime and awful beauty.
Above was the sky—deeply, intensely blue, such as in Italy meets the
enchanted gaze. Below was a floor of pure white cloud, spread out, as it
appeared to Mabel, like a vast sea of cotton, on which lay piled here and
there vast masses, or islands of snow. Some of these masses were floating
beneath them with a slow and majestic motion, impelled by currents of
wind which did not reach the strata of air to which the balloon had
ascended. Presently the white floor seemed gradually to part on either
side, and an opening appeared through which a strange panoramic view of
the earth burst on the wondering eye. It lay—Oh! how far beneath! There
was no distinction of mountain or plain, a dim blue hue tinted all. In
the words of a former æronaut,—“The whole appeared a perfect plain, the
highest building having no apparent height, but reduced all to the same
level, and the whole terrestrial prospect seemed like a coloured map.”
There lay Dashleigh Hall, the seat of ancestral pride, shrunk to the
appearance of a tiny toy,—a mere nothing viewed from that awful height,
even as all earth’s pomps and grandeur must appear to those who survey
them from heaven. For the first time since he had worn his honours,
Dashleigh felt them no cause for pride. He was in his own eyes no peer,
no lofty aristocrat, but a poor, weak child of man, with every nerve
unstrung, and an undefined horror hanging over him. Gladly would he then
have exchanged places with the poorest peasant standing on solid ground,
though not possessing a single foot of it.
“Look upwards—upwards—not downwards!” cried Augustine, alarmed at the
wild expression on the haggard face of his friend. “Lie down, Dashleigh,
at the bottom of the car, and fix your gaze on the sky above!”
“Uncle!” exclaimed Mabel, “how strange your voice sounds—like what one
might hear in a dream; and my own, too, seems quite different from what
it was when we were on the ground.”
“This is the effect of the rarified air upon the ear.”
“Uncle, the objects below us grow smaller and smaller, we must be rising
higher and higher; I thought that you meant to descend.”
Augustine’s only reply was a look which in an instant, as by a lightning
flash, revealed to the young girl the full danger of their situation.
“You cannot descend!” she gasped forth, clasping her hands in terror.
“Remember _him_,” said Augustine in a very low voice; “if he knew our
helpless condition, I believe that it would turn his brain.”
“But cannot you tell how to let out the gas?”
“I cannot—”
“You who know everything—”
“I do not know this.”
Mabel sank back upon the seat from which she had half risen while
addressing her uncle, who, holding firmly by a rope, was standing upright
in the car. She was a brave girl, and acted as such; she neither uttered
cry nor shed tear, but she turned very pale and cold, and shivered as if
mantled in ice. It gave her now a sickening oppression to gaze below.
Was she never, never to return to that earth which lay beneath her—never
again to be pressed to her father’s heart—never to meet the smile of her
sister! Was she to float on in these dreary regions never before visited
by man, buoyed up in a moving coffin, till—
The awful, deathlike stillness was suddenly broken by a sharp report,
sounding to the startled ears of the travellers something like that of a
pistol! It was but a cork in the refreshment basket going off from the
diminished pressure of the atmosphere causing the wine in the bottle to
expand, but the explosion of a cannon could hardly have produced a more
startling effect than a noise so sudden and so unexpected. Dashleigh
sprang like a maniac from the bottom of the car, in which he had been
quietly lying, and made a frantic attempt to throw himself out of the
car. Augustine had to struggle and wrestle to keep him down, as one
engaged in a contest for life; and the _Eaglet_, at the same time,
passing into a violent current of air, rocked and shook, and swung to
such an extent, that Mabel had to grasp tight hold of the wicker-work to
prevent herself from being flung down into the clouds which again had
closed beneath them.
The whirlwind grew yet more tremendous, tossing to and fro the enormous
balloon as if it had been a bubble on the current, actually turning it
round and round, and making the car describe a wide swinging circuit
below it.
It was a very awful moment—a moment in which the heart almost ceases to
beat, and the only utterance of the soul can be a cry to the God that
made it! It seemed as in answer to that instinctive prayer to the ear
that is never closed, that the whirlwind soon appeared to lessen its
violence, the motion of the balloon abated, the frightful swinging of the
car ceased, and Augustine uttered a faint “thank God!” while Dashleigh
sank senseless at his feet!