and the irregular cluster of houses that constitutes Dymchurch.
He could see the little crowd of people he had so abruptly left.
Grubb, in the white wrapper of a Desert Dervish, was running
along the edge of the sea. Mr. Butteridge was knee-deep in the
water, bawling immensely. The lady was sitting up with her
floriferous hat in her lap, shockingly neglected. The beach,
east and west, was dotted with little people--they seemed all
heads and feet--looking up. And the balloon, released from the
twenty-five stone or so of Mr. Butteridge and his lady, was
rushing up into the sky at the pace of a racing motor-car. "My
crikey!" said Bert; "here's a go!"

He looked down with a pinched face at the receding beach, and
reflected that he wasn't giddy; then he made a superficial survey
of the cords and ropes about him with a vague idea of "doing
something." "I'm not going to mess about with the thing," he
said at last, and sat down upon the mattress. "I'm not going to
touch it.... I wonder what one ought to do?"

Soon he got up again and stared for a long time it the sinking
world below, at white cliffs to the east and flattening marsh to
the left, at a minute wide prospect of weald and downland, at dim
towns and harbours and rivers and ribbon-like roads, at ships and
ships, decks and foreshortened funnels upon the ever-widening
sea, and at the great mono-rail bridge that straddled the Channel
from Folkestone to Boulogne, until at last, first little wisps
and then a veil of filmy cloud hid the prospect from his eyes.
He wasn't at all giddy nor very much frightened, only in a state
of enormous consternation.