I SHALL never forget this first and sudden leap to such terrifying altitudes. I thought we would never stop rising, and stood breathless as I saw the earth leave us, sink in at the centre, and swell out at the horizon like a bowl.

How often have we not followed with delighted eyes the majestic flight of the clouds, and longed for their liberty and the freedom of their voyages in the skies?

Rolled in heavy masses by the winds that drive them on, they move peacefully in the sunlight like a fleet of sombre ships, with prows of solid gold. Now bunched together in small and graceful groups, thin and sleek like birds of passage, they fly swiftly with the breeze, iridescent and translucent, like huge opals picked from the treasures of heaven, or sparkling with immaculate candor, like the snow the winds harvest on the crest of inaccessible sierras, and carry off on their invisible wings.

They have seen, perhaps in a single day, the countries and the homes we love, and cherish in remembrance or in hope. They have passed over spots that have beaten time to our happiest hours; they have looked down upon places that have witnessed our deepest sorrows.

Up to their glittering realm we rise, and cutting through the impalpable vapor, we reach the upper spheres of everlasting starlight and sunshine, where the limits of the empyrean begin, that mysterious zone, visited only by the queen bee, once in her lifetime, on the day of her “nuptial flight.”

Followed by ten thousand lovers, each with ten thousand eyes to watch her, she ascends like a prayer in the sweet-scented freshness of the morning.

The amorous horde, like the moving tail of a comet, devours the space beneath her.

Never before has she breathed the dew-laden breeze, never has she felt the blinding rays of the sun.

But she has heard the eternal voice of nature; and drunk with the perfume of a million flowers, staggered by the riotous cries and plaintive wails of her wooing drones, transfixed by the ocean of divine light above her, she rises to heights unknown. One by one, her exhausted lovers have given up the chase and fallen like so many stones in the depths of the abyss below: strange and mystic manifestation of the survival of the fittest.

Now a mere handful, with throbbing flanks and starting eyeballs, strives to follow her to the mysterious sacrifice of royal love and death.

One, the last one, the Chosen one reaches his Queen; her arms are open to receive him, and he falls in their mortal embrace. He lives his whole life in a second, and gives up the ghost in one gasp of ineffable ecstasy.

The varied emotions of our trip above the clouds are simply superhuman, but the owner does not seem to enjoy them:

“On ne s’amuse pas ici—descendons.” I know he is longing to play with the trees again; but before I can answer, the valve-rope is jerked, and we drop two or three thousand feet.

Looking up through the open appendix, I can see the interior of the balloon, the valve-rope hanging in the centre, and watch the valve open and close at the top.

We are now traveling with the wind at a speed of forty miles an hour, but we feel no motion whatever. The hills, the meadows, the hamlets, rush toward us in a mad race, as if driven by the mighty hand of God.

The world looks like a painted atlas, with every little detail carefully marked. As I compare it with the military map in my hands, I can not tell which is the better of the two; and, moreover, at this altitude, they both seem the same size.

The captain is throwing out ballast,—quite a lot it seems to me. But the barometer is still falling. Down we go, and in a moment we are close to earth again. Half a dozen peasants are harvesting in the grain fields.

“Captain! we are dead birds this time!”

“Pas encore,” replies the owner, “but be sure before we touch ground to swing up on the hoop above you or the shock might break your legs.”

The advice is worth following. No sooner said than done, and the basket after kicking off the top of a haystack, drops in the midst of the dumfounded farmers.

Relieved for a second of its weight, the “Rolla” bounds ahead. More ballast flies out, and we are off on another trip to the clouds.

Exposed, as it is, alternately to the burning rays of the sun and the numerous cool currents that we meet on our way, the “Rolla” soon becomes flighty and hard to control. A few minutes later we are not two hundred feet over the meadows.

Another rise, without apparently any cause for it, and soon we are falling again; this time over the ancient city of Sens, with its beautiful cathedral, around which the quaint old houses are huddled, and held close together by a belt of green boulevards.

As I wonder how we would look impaled on that sharp gothic steeple, a dozen pounds of ballast sends us skyward like a rocket.

“It’s not the distance, it’s the pace that kills.”

L.A. Robertson: The Dead Calypso.