I had made a mistake in my estimate of the wind's force by a few yards. Instead of being carried on to fall on the Seine embankment I now found myself hanging in my wicker basket high up in the courtyard of the Trocadero hotels, supported by my air-ship's keel, which stood braced at an angle of about 45 degrees between the courtyard wall above and the roof of a lower construction farther down. The keel, in spite of my weight, that of the motor and machinery, and the shock it had received in falling, resisted wonderfully. The thin pine scantlings and piano wires of Nice had saved my life!
After what seemed tedious waiting I saw a rope being lowered to me from the roof above. I held to it, and was hauled up, when I perceived my rescuers to be the brave firemen of Paris. From their station at Passy they had been watching the flight of the air-ship. They had seen my fall, and immediately hastened to the spot. Then, having rescued me, they proceeded to rescue the air-ship.
The operation was painful. The remains of the balloon envelope and the suspension wires hung lamentably, and it was impossible to disengage them except in strips and fragments!
So I escaped--and my escape may have been narrow--but it was not from the particular danger always present in my mind during this period of trials around the Eiffel Tower. A Parisian journalist said that had the Eiffel Tower not existed it would have been necessary to invent it for the needs of aerostation. It is true that the engineers who remain at its summit have at their hands all necessary instruments for observing aerial and meteorological conditions: their chronometers are exact; and, as Professor Langley has said in a communication to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Committee, the position of the Tower as a central landmark, visible to everyone from considerable distances, made it a unique winning-post for an aerial contest. I myself had circled round it at a respectful distance, of my own free will, in 1899, before the stipulation of the Deutsch prize competition was dreamed of. Yet none of these considerations altered the other fact that the necessity to round the Eiffel Tower attached a unique element of danger to the task.
