THE PLEASURES OF BALLOONING
1229
louder. Around the bay a thousand handkerchiefs were fluttering. I gave a sharp turn to the helm, and the airship leapt into the bay, to slow down and be caught and conducted to its “ stable.”
Here in these azure solitudes there were no chimney pots of Paris, no cruelly threatening roof corners. I had plenty of leisure to look about me and enjoy my position. One of my impressions was that I was still isolated in spite of my ability to direct the airship’s course. I remember once meeting two beautiful sailing yachts scudding toward me down the coast. Their sails were full bellied. As I darted over them and they beneath me, I heard a faint cheer, and a graceful feminine figure on the foremost yacht waved a red foulard. As I turned to answer the politeness I perceived that we were already far, far apart.
I was now well up the coast, about half way between Monaco and Cape Saint-Martin. Above was the limitless blue void; below was the solitude of the white-capped waves, and a sudden squall was coming up. Well, I had the fierce pleasure of depending on myself, with every sense alert, and a growing curiosity to learn the power of my motor and propeller to get me out of the scrape. I had never turned in a storm.
Porting my helm, I held the rudder tight. The dirigible swung around like a boat, and as the wind now aided to send me flying down the coast my only work was to maintain my steady course and enjoy the reflections I have already described.
Pleasures like these—the triumphs of personal effort from minute to minute—the spherical balloonist may not know. I recall a similar moment of fierce enjoyment on my return from the Eiffel Tower, when I won the Deutsch Prize for aerial navigation in October, 1901. On my way to the Tower the motor had worked fairly well. Now, after I had left it some 500 yards behind me, it was actually on the point of stopping. I had an instant of great uncertainty. I must make a quick decision. It was to abandon the steering wheel for a moment, at the risk of being torn from my course, in order to give my attention to the carburating lever and the lever controlling the electric spark.
The motor began to work again. I had almost reached the Bois de Boulogne, where, by a phenomenon known to all aeronauts, the cool air from the trees began making the balloon heavier and heavier—i.e., smaller by condensation—when, by an unlucky coincidence, the motor began slowing again. Thus the airship was descending while its motive force was decreasing. I had instantly to throw back both guide rope and shifting weights, changing my center of gravity considerably. This caused the balloon to point diagonally upward, so that the remaining propeller force caused me to remount continually into the air by jerks, so to speak.
I was directly over the crowd of the Auteuil Racetrack. I heard the applause of the mighty throng, when suddenly my capricious motor started working like a beau diable. The suddenly accelerated propeller being almost under the up-pointing airship caused an exaggeration of the inclination, so that the applause of the crowd changed to cries of alarm as I darted for a moment almost vertically upward. As for myself I had no fear, knowing the circumstances and feeling doubly safe over the trees of the Bois de Boulogne, whose soft greenery always reassured me, in spite of its having played me many a trick in my earlier experiments. I might have checked the sensational upward shoot by simply slowing the motor that was causing it; but I was doing a race that I actually did win, so I went on, soon righting myself by shifting guide rope and weights forward again. All the same, this is why I passed so high over the judges’ heads that my guide rope could not be caught—a detail that caused some hair-splitting at the time, as may be remembered.
If I were asked what were my very first sensations of aerial navigation, I would have to confess surprise to feel the airship going straight ahead. It was astonishing to feel the wind in my face. As a spherical balloonist I had always gone in the wind, becoming part of it and not feeling it. As my airship plowed ahead the wind fluttered my coat violently, as on the deck of an Atlantic liner, tho in all other respects it is more like river navigation with a steam-boat. It is not at all like sail navigation
