Part 9 (1/2)
Half an hour later, the doctor, seeing the country deserted, moderated the flaround At twenty feet above the turf, the affrighted sorcerer : he let himself drop, fell on his feet, and scampered off at a furious pace toward Kazeh; while the balloon, suddenly relieved of his weight, again shot up on her course
CHAPTER SIXTEENTH
Symptoms of a Storm-The Country of the Moon-The Future of the African Continent-The Last Machine of all-A View of the Country at Sunset-Flora and Fauna-The Tempest-The Zone of Fire-The Starry Heavens
”See,” said Joe, ”what co the sons of the ly trick But say, e your credit as a physician?”
”Yes, indeed,” chinitary was this Sultan of Kazeh?”
”An old half-dead sot,” replied the doctor, ”whose loss will not be very severely felt But the , and we reat a fancy to them”
”So -to be worshi+pped!-Play the God as you like! Why, ould any one ask more than that? By-the-way, the e”
While the three friends went on chatting of this and other things, and Joe exaht from an entirely novel point of view, the heavens became covered with heavy clouds to the northward, and the loweringlook Quite a smart breeze, found about three hundred feet from the earth, drove the balloon toward the north-northeast; and above it the blue vault was clear; but the atmosphere felt close and dull
The aeronauts found therees forty rees seventeen minutes latitude The atmospheric currents, under the influence of a te them at the rate of fro and fertile plains of Mfuto were passing swiftly beneath them The spectacle was one worthy of adht in the country of the Moon,” said Dr Ferguson; ”for it has retained the naave it, undoubtedly, because the es It is, really, a superb country”
”It would be hard to find etation”
”If we found the like of it around London it would not be natural, but it would be very pleasant,” put in Joe ”Why is it that such savage countries get all these fine things?”
”And who knows,” said the doctor, ”that this country may not, one day, become the centre of civilization? The races of the future may repair hither, when Europe shall have become exhausted in the effort to feed her inhabitants”
”Do you think so, really?” asked Kennedy
”Undoubtedly, ress of events: consider the rations of races, and you will arrive at the same conclusion assuredly Asia was the first nurse of the world, was she not? For about four thousand years she travailed, she grew pregnant, she produced, and then, when stones began to cover the soil where the golden harvests sung by Homer had flourished, her children abandoned her exhausted and barren boso and vigorous Europe, which has nourished them for the last two thousand years But already her fertility is beginning to die out; her productive powers are di every day Those new diseases that annually attack the products of the soil, those defective crops, those insufficient resources, are all signs of a vitality that is rapidly wearing out and of an approaching exhaustion Thus, we already see theto the luxuriant bosom of America, as a source of help, not inexhaustible indeed, but not yet exhausted In its turn, that new continent will grow old; its virgin forests will fall before the axe of industry, and its soil will beco too fully produced what had been demanded of it Where two harvests blooathered froth Then, Africa will be there to offer to new races the treasures that for centuries have been accuers will be purified by cultivation and by drainage of the soil, and those scattered water supplies will be gathered into one coation Then this country over which we are now passing, more fertile, richer, and fuller of vitality than the rest, will beco discoveries than steaht”
”Ah! sir,” said Joe, ”I'd like to see all that”
”You got up too early in the , my boy!”
”Besides,” said Kennedy, ”that may prove to be a very dull period when industry will s up every thing for its own profit By dint of inventingeaten up by it! I have always fancied that the end of the earth will be when some enormous boiler, heated to three thousand millions of atmospheric pressure, shall explode and blow up our Globe!”
”And I add that the Americans,” said Joe, ”will not have been the last to work at the reat boiler- ourselves to be carried away by such speculations, let us rest content with enjoying the beauties of this country of the Moon, since we have been per his last rays beneath the old the slightest inequalities of the ground below; gigantic trees, arborescent bushes, mosses on the even surface-all had their share of this lu, here and there rose into little conical hills; there were no mountains visible on the horizon; ies of thorny jungle, separated the clearings dotted with nues, and immense euphorbiae surrounded the their trunks with the coral-shaped branches of the shrubbery and undergrowth
Ere long, the Malagazeri, the chief tributary of Lake Tanganayika, was seen winding between heavy thickets of verdure, offering an asylu from the torrents formed in the season of freshets, or fro froht, it was a chain of waterfalls thrown across the whole western face of the country
Ani in the luxuriant prairies, and were half hidden, so forests in blooaze like immense bouquets; but, in these bouquets, lions, leopards, hyenas, and tigers, were then crouching for shelter fro sun Froroay to and fro, and you could hear the crackling of huge branches as his ponderous ivory tusks broke the country!” exclaier to restrain his enthusiasle ball fired at randoame worthy of it Suppose we try it once!”
”No, ht with a teround-and the storms are awful in this country, where the heated soil is like one vast electric battery”
”You are right, sir,” said Joe, ”the heat has got to be enough to choke one, and the breeze has died away One can feel that so”
”The atmosphere is saturated with electricity,” replied the doctor; ”every living creature is sensible that this state of the air portends a struggle of the elements, and I confess that I never before was so full of the fluid ested dick, ”would it not be advisable to alight?”
”On the contrary, dick, I'd rather go up, only that I a carried out ofin the at the route that we have followed since we left the coast?”
”If I can e to do so,” replied the doctor, ”I will turn rees; I shall then endeavor to ascend toward the presumed latitudes of the sources of the Nile; perhaps we may discover solin's caravan Unless I arees forty itude, and I should like to ascend directly north of the equator”
”Look there!” exclai out of the pools-thosethe air aloud!”
”They're choking!” ejaculated Joe ”Ah! what a fine way to travel this is; and how one can snap his fingers at all that vermin!-Doctor! Mr Kennedy! see those packs of wild aniether There are fully two hundred Those are wolves”
”No! Joe, not wolves, but wild dogs; a famous breed that does not hesitate to attack the lion himself They are the worst customers a traveller could meet, for they would instantly tear him to pieces”
”Well, it isn't Joe that'll undertake to h, if that's the nature of the beast, we radually settled down under the influence of the ier adapted to the transmission of sound; the at with tapestry, lost all its sonorous reverberation The ”rover bird” so-called, the coroneted crane, the red and blue jays, the e of the immense trees, and all nature revealed sy catastrophe
At nine o'clock the Victoria hung es scarcely distinguishable in the glooht in the dull water disclosed a succession of ditches regularly arranged, and, by one last gleam, the eye could make out the calantic euphorbiae
”I a, with all the power of his lungs, asan inch! Let us descend!”
”But the tempest!” said the doctor, withcarried away by the wind, it seems to me that there is no other course to pursue”
”Perhaps the storh”
”That is just the thing thatbeyond theht of the earth, and not know all night whether ere ”
”Make up your mind, dear doctor, for time presses!”
”It's a pity that the wind has fallen,” said Joe, again; ”it would have carried us clear of the storm”
”It is, indeed, a pity, erous for us; they contain opposing currents which ht set on fire Again, those perils avoided, the force of the teround, e to cast our anchor in the tree-tops”