During the early period when I was glad to make public ascents for my balloon constructor I had undergone a somewhat similar experience, and that by night. The ascent took place at Péronne, in the north of France, one stormy afternoon, quite late. Indeed, I started in spite of thunder threatening in the distance, a gloomy semi-twilight all around me, and the remonstrances of the public, among whom it was known that I was not an aeronaut by trade. They feared my inexperience, and wished me either to renounce the ascent or else to oblige me to take up the balloon constructor with me, he being the responsible organiser of the _fête_.
I would listen to nothing, and started off as I had planned. Soon I had cause to regret my rashness. I was alone, lost in the clouds, amid flashes of lightning and claps of thunder, in the rapidly-approaching darkness of the night!
On, on I went tearing in the blackness. I knew that I must be going with great speed, yet felt no motion. I heard and felt the storm. I formed a part of the storm. I felt myself in great danger, yet the danger was not tangible. With it there was a fierce kind of joy. What shall I say? How shall I describe it? Up there in the black solitude, amid the lightning flashes and the thunderclaps, I was a part of the storm.
When I landed the next morning--long after I had sought a higher altitude and let the storm pass on beneath me--I found that I was well into Belgium. The dawn was peaceful, so that my landing took place without difficulty. I mention this adventure because it was made account of in the papers of the time, and to show that night ballooning, even in a storm, may be more dangerous in appearance than reality. Indeed, night ballooning has a charm that is all its own.
One is alone in the black void--true, in a murky limbo, where one seems to float without weight, without a surrounding world--a soul freed from the weight of matter. Yet now and again there are the lights of earth to cheer one. We see a point of light far on ahead. Slowly it expands. Then where there was one blaze there are countless bright spots. They run in lines, with here and there a brighter cluster. We know that it is a city.
Then, again, it is out into the lone land, with only a faint glow here and there. When the moon rises we see, perhaps, a faint curling line of grey. It is a river, with the moonlight falling on its waters.