[Illustration: A VELT HILLOCK. THE SOLITARY TREE WAS FULL OF NESTS OF WEAVER-BIRDS.]
The mystery of a deep harmonious influence belongs to the mighty wilderness. It reveals itself in its full beauty to him who has strenuously acquired a love for it by making a long sojourn in it and paying to it the tribute it demands.
A stony wilderness extends endlessly on all sides, and the sight ranges without limit over the expanse that loses itself in mist and cloud. A barren stony sea, as far as the eye can reach!
But it is not the velt or the African desert that lies below us as we rise one moment a hundred yards above the surface of the earth and the next three hundred yards and more. It is the sea of houses that form the capital of the German Empire.... In a few seconds the view takes in all the full extent of the mighty city, and then, as if in a dream, what we have just seen disappears from our sight. Borne by a breeze, of which we are hardly aware, our balloon sweeps towards the Baltic Sea.... It is a strange feeling thus to enjoy, thanks to our lofty point of outlook, an extended view far over the level March of Brandenburg with its teeming population all below us, a view which, old as the world is, has been vouchsafed to few mortal men. The city, with all its human life and activity, lies far below us. Its roar and tumult, that strange voice of the stony sea, has died away. We begin to make a long journey only a few hundred feet above the surface of the earth. Later on we rise, sailing through banks and clouds to a height of nine thousand feet above the earth, but before this higher ascent we have time and leisure to take a bird’s-eye view of “all that creeps and flies.” What an outlook over forest and plain! As we fly over them, horses grazing in paddocks, cattle on the pastures, for a moment suggest to me an illusion of the African velt peopled with its wild life. The eye, again and again fascinated by this prospect as a whole, can hardly grasp the details. Now our course is over endless open heaths, over moors and woodlands. The fleet-footed red deer, frightened by the drag-rope, look up in astonishment and stare at the strange monster, not knowing whither to turn in flight from such a menacing apparition. How the strange monster was a few hours later within a hair’s breadth of burying us in the waves of the Baltic Sea is another story....