“Look upwards—upwards—not downwards!” cried Augustine, alarmed at the wild expression on the haggard face of his friend. “Lie down, Dashleigh, at the bottom of the car, and fix your gaze on the sky above!”
“Uncle!” exclaimed Mabel, “how strange your voice sounds—like what one might hear in a dream; and my own, too, seems quite different from what it was when we were on the ground.”
“This is the effect of the rarified air upon the ear.”
“Uncle, the objects below us grow smaller and smaller, we must be rising higher and higher; I thought that you meant to descend.”
Augustine’s only reply was a look which in an instant, as by a lightning flash, revealed to the young girl the full danger of their situation.
“You cannot descend!” she gasped forth, clasping her hands in terror.
“Remember _him_,” said Augustine in a very low voice; “if he knew our helpless condition, I believe that it would turn his brain.”
“But cannot you tell how to let out the gas?”
Mabel sank back upon the seat from which she had half risen while addressing her uncle, who, holding firmly by a rope, was standing upright in the car. She was a brave girl, and acted as such; she neither uttered cry nor shed tear, but she turned very pale and cold, and shivered as if mantled in ice. It gave her now a sickening oppression to gaze below. Was she never, never to return to that earth which lay beneath her—never again to be pressed to her father’s heart—never to meet the smile of her sister! Was she to float on in these dreary regions never before visited by man, buoyed up in a moving coffin, till—
The awful, deathlike stillness was suddenly broken by a sharp report, sounding to the startled ears of the travellers something like that of a pistol! It was but a cork in the refreshment basket going off from the diminished pressure of the atmosphere causing the wine in the bottle to expand, but the explosion of a cannon could hardly have produced a more startling effect than a noise so sudden and so unexpected. Dashleigh sprang like a maniac from the bottom of the car, in which he had been quietly lying, and made a frantic attempt to throw himself out of the car. Augustine had to struggle and wrestle to keep him down, as one engaged in a contest for life; and the _Eaglet_, at the same time, passing into a violent current of air, rocked and shook, and swung to such an extent, that Mabel had to grasp tight hold of the wicker-work to prevent herself from being flung down into the clouds which again had closed beneath them.