to be doing that. When he got used to it, he found this rotation
of the balloon rather convenient; it saved moving about in the
car.

5

Late in the afternoon of a pleasant summer day in the year 191-,
if one may borrow a mode of phrasing that once found favour with
the readers of the late G. P. R. James, a solitary
balloonist--replacing the solitary horseman of the classic
romances--might have been observed wending his way across
Franconia in a north-easterly direction, and at a height of about
eleven thousand feet above the sea and still spindling slowly.
His head was craned over the side of the car, and he surveyed the
country below with an expression of profound perplexity; ever and
again his lips shaped inaudible words. "Shootin' at a chap," for
example, and "I'll come down right enough soon as I find out
'ow." Over the side of the basket the robe of the Desert Dervish
was hanging, an appeal for consideration, an ineffectual white
flag.

He was now very distinctly aware that the world below him, so far
from being the naive countryside of his earlier imaginings that
day, sleepily unconscious of him and capable of being amazed and
nearly reverential at his descent, was acutely irritated by his
career, and extremely impatient with the course he was
taking.--But indeed it was not he who took that course, but his
masters, the winds of heaven. Mysterious voices spoke to him in
his ear, jerking the words up to him by means of megaphones, in a
weird and startling manner, in a great variety of languages.