d-air
south-westerly from the scene of the skirmish outside the Sir Ulang
Pass.

She was bound for a region in the midst of Africa, which, even in the
first decade of the twentieth century, was still unknown to the
geographer and untrodden by the explorer.

Fenced in by huge and precipitous mountains, round whose bases lay
vast forests and impenetrable swamps and jungles, from whose deadly
areas the boldest pioneers had turned aside as being too hopelessly
inhospitable to repay the cost and toil of exploration, it had
remained undiscovered and unknown save by two men, who had reached it
by the only path by which it was accessible--through the air and over
the mountains which shut it in on every side from the external world.

These two adventurous travellers were a wealthy and eccentric
Englishman, named Louis Holt, and Thomas Jackson, his devoted
retainer, and these two had taken it into their heads--or rather
Louis Holt had taken it into his head--to achieve in fact the feat
which Jules Verne had so graphically described in fiction, and to
cross Africa in a balloon.

They had set out from Zanzibar towards the end of the last year of
the nineteenth century, and, with the exception of one or two vague
reports from the interior, nothing more had been heard of them until,
nearly a year later, a collapsed miniature balloon had been picked up
in the Gulf of Guinea by the captain of a trading steamer, who had
found in the little car attached to it a hermetically sealed
meat-tin, which contained a manuscript, the contents of which will
become apparent in due course.

The captain of the steamer was a practical and somewhat stupid man,
who read the manuscript with considerable scepticism, and then put it
away, having come to the conclusion that it was no business of his,
and that there was no money in it anyhow. He thought nothing more of
it until he got back to Liverpool, and then he gave it to a friend of
his, who was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and who duly
laid it before that body.

It was published in the _Transactions_, and there was some talk of
sending out an expedition under the command of an eminent explorer to
rescue Louis Holt and his servant; but when that personage was
approached on the subject, it was found that the glory would not be
at all commensurate with the expense and risk, and so, after being
the usual nine days' wonder, and being duly elaborated by several
able editors in the dail