Page:Amazing Stories Volume 01 Number 08.djvu/94
“Four!” The car fell, but I instinctively clung to the cords and hoisted myself into the meshes of the netting.
The madman disappeared in space!
The balloon rose to an immeasurable height. A horrible cracking was heard. The gas, too much dilated, had burst the balloon. I shut my eyes
Some instants after, a damp warmth revived me. I was in the midst of clouds on fire. The balloon turned over with dizzy velocity. Taken by the wind, it made a hundred leagues an hour in a horizontal course, the lightning flashing around it.
Meanwhile my fall was not a very rapid one. When I opened my eyes, I saw the country. I was two miles from the sea, and the tempest was driving me violently towards it, when an abrupt shock forced me to loosen my hold. My hands opened, a cord slipped swiftly between my fingers, and I found myself on the solid earth?
It was the cord of the anchor, which, sweeping along the surface of the ground, was caught in a crevice; and my balloon, unballasted for the last time, careered off to lose itself beyond the sea,
When I came to myself, I was in bed in a peasant’s cottage, at Harderwijk, a village of Gelderland, fifteen leagues from Amsterdam, on the shores of the Zuyder-Zee.
A miracle had saved my life, but my voyage had been a series of imprudences, committed by a lunatic, and I had not been able to prevent them.
May this terrible narrative, though instructing those who read it, not discourage the explorers of the air.
The End
Stars
Out through space my spirit leaps,
Swifter far than light;
Up to the lunar craters,
Gilded, banked with night;
Over the channeled, ruddy Mars,
Up through Saturn’s rings;
Parting the hair of comets,
On my spirit winge;
Out where vast and awful voids
Space the Milky Way—
Room for earths by hundreds
To spin the night and day;
Straight through stuff of orbs unborn,
Mammoth nebulæ;
Lost where stars by thousands
Light the Ether Sea;
Far in timeless, bournless space
Till systems cease to roll;
Ever vainly seeking
Hope and the Supersoul.
Millions die who never knew
Half I see and ken
While I circle madly
Through the stars. And then—
Back to earth my spirit falls,
Tired of cosmic dust;
Needing a human being,
Human love and trust;
Gilding down on fancy’s wings
Deep among the hills,
Where the elms and maples
Arch the flowered rills;
Back to dark-haired Mirabel
All my being flies;
Back to a wide-arm welcome
And the cosmos of her eyes.
—By Leland S. Copeland