(_Later._)—The convention is in full swing. What enthusiasm must inspire these “tourists,” for, of course, it is in this character that they travel. Most, I hear, are very badly off, their funds being supplied by their associations. A great deal of provisions and _matériel_ has been brought aboard. How well this crusade is organized!
Hartmann remains on board, he has never left the vessel except on the occasion when he visited his mother. Burnett and Schwartz take his instructions to the delegates, and most of the crew escort them. We are floating very near the ground in a rude clearing on the mountain side, two rope-ladders and some cables link us with the soil. After several hours’ conference below, the delegates visit the _Attila_. Heavens! what desperadoes some look! Yet they control, so Burnett says, vast societies. Hartmann interviews each. He works patiently through the list, and finally addresses them _en masse_, launching terms of the most animated invective against modern civilization. Am, of course, excluded, but learn that everything has gone off admirably. Five of the delegates are to join the crew, the rest carry back their instructions. We start early in the morning. What a spectacle there is before us! However, two days’ breathing time is something. Trust that delegate, whoever he is, will not forget the telegram and letter to Lena.
During the return to England two incidents of note, both alike terrible, but terrible in widely different ways, chequered our voyage, and the first of these it will now be my task to detail.
Wealth of romance, witchery of mountain scenery, and panoramas of ever-varying landscapes in the plains—whatever happiness can be gleaned from these was mine in bounteous plenty. Hitherto, however, the _Attila_ had met with gentle winds and fairly clear skies; she was a gay butterfly by day and a listless moth by night. She had shortly to display to me her prowess as a rider of the tempest. This experience, along with its sequel of grim incident, impressed me deeply. I shall try to awake in the reader some echo of the emotions which it stirred into fervour within me.
No one, at any rate, could charge Hartmann with boring his unsolicited guest. Feasted as I had been with pictures, I was destined to be swept through ever novel galleries of natural marvels. I had anticipated that we should return by a like route to that by which we had arrived, but a pleasant reversal of this view was in store for me. Leaving the slopes of the Jura behind her, the _Attila_ sped in a southwesterly direction across the department of Aisne, over Lyons, westward across the extinct volcanoes of Auvergne, then curving slightly to the south she leapt the river Dordogne, and, finally, passing at a great height over Bordeaux, reached the ocean rim over the desolate _Landes_ which span the coast-line betwixt the Garonne estuary and the Adour. Had I been exploring Central Africa in the interests of science, I should feel justified in presenting my observations at length. But the tracts beneath me being so familiar, such procedure would be both useless and troublesome. I must therefore leave the imaginative to put themselves in my place and picture these well-known districts as transfigured by the romance of air-travelling.
