blast furnaces of Montataire? So then we are above Creil. The view is
superb; it is dark on the earth, but we are still in the light, and it is
now past ten o'clock. Now we begin to hear slight country noises, the
double cry of the quail in particular, then the mewing of cats and the
barking of dogs. Surely the dogs have scented the balloon; they have seen
it and have given the alarm. We can hear them barking all over the plain
and making the identical noise they make when baying at the moon. The
cows also seem to wake up in the barns, for we can hear them lowing; all
the beasts are scared and moved before the aerial monster that is
passing.

The delicious odors of the soil rise toward us, the smell of hay, of
flowers, of the moist, verdant earth, perfuming the air-a light air, in
fact, so light, so sweet, so delightful that I realize I never was so
fortunate as to breathe before. A profound sense of well-being, unknown
to me heretofore, pervades me, a well-being of body and spirit, composed
of supineness, of infinite rest, of forgetfulness, of indifference to
everything and of this novel sensation of traversing space without any of
the sensations that make motion unbearable, without noise, without shocks
and without fear.

At times we rise and then descend. Every few minutes Lieutenant Mallet,
suspended in his cobweb of netting, says to Captain Jovis: "We are
descending; throw down half a handful." And the captain, who is talking
and laughing with us, with a bag of ballast between his legs, takes a
handful of sand out of the bag and throws it overboard.

Nothing is more amusing, more delicate, more interesting than the
manoeuvring of a balloon. It is an enormous toy, free and docile, which
obeys with surprising sensitiveness, but it is also, and before all, the
slave of the wind, which we cannot control. A pinch of sand, half a sheet
of paper, one or two drops of water, the bones of a chicken which we had
just eaten, thrown overboard, makes it go up quickly.

A breath of cool, damp air rising from the river or the wood we are
traversing makes the balloon descend two hundred metres. It does not vary
when passing over fields of ripe grain, and it rises when it passes over
towns.

The earth sleeps now, or, rather, men sleep on the earth, for the beasts
awakened by the sight of our balloon announce our approach everywhere.
Now and then the rolling of a train or the whistling of a locomotive is
plainly distinguishabl