The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson – Swanston Edition. Volume 20

“I have never tried it; but I calculate on twenty hours – say twenty-four at a pinch.”

“We will test it. The current, I see, is still north-east, or from that to north-by-east. And our height?”

He consulted the barometer. “Something under three miles.”

Dalmahoy heard, and whooped. “Hi! you fellows, come to lunch! Sandwiches, shortbread, and cleanest Glenlivet – Elshander’s Feast:

“‘Let old Timotheus yield the prize,
Or both divide the crown;
He raised a mortal to the skies – ’

Sheepshanks provided the whisky. Rise, Elshander: observe that you have no worlds left to conquer, and, having shed the perfunctory tear, pass the corkscrew. Come along, Ducie: come, my Dædalian boy; if you are not hungry, I am, and so is – Sheepshanks – what the dickens do you mean by consorting with a singular verb? Verbum cum nominativo– I should say, so are sheepshanks.”

Byfield produced from one of the lockers a pork pie and a bottle of sherry (the viaticum in choice and assortment almost explained the man) and we sat down to the repast. Dalmahoy’s tongue ran like a brook. He addressed Mr. Sheepshanks with light-hearted impartiality as Philip’s royal son, as the Man of Ross, as the divine Clarinda. He elected him Professor of Marital Diplomacy to the University of Cramond. He passed the bottle and called on him for a toast, a song – “Oblige me, Sheepshanks, by making the welkin ring.” Mr. Sheepshanks beamed, and gave us a sentiment instead. The little man was enjoying himself amazingly. “Fund of spirits your friend has, to be sure, sir – quite a fund.”

Either my own spirits were running low or the bitter cold had congealed them. I was conscious of my thin ball-suit, and moreover of a masterful desire of sleep. I felt no inclination for food, but drained half a tumblerful of the Sheepshanks whisky, and crawled beneath the pile of plaids. Byfield considerately helped to arrange them. He may or may not have caught some accent of uncertainty in my thanks: at any rate he thought fit to add the assurance, “You may trust me, Mr. Ducie.” I saw that I could, and began almost to like the fellow.

In this posture I dozed through the afternoon. In dreams I heard Dalmahoy and Sheepshanks lifting their voices in amœbæan song, and became languidly aware that they were growing uproarious. I heard Byfield expostulating, apparently in vain: for I awoke next to find that Sheepshanks had stumbled over me while illustrating, with an empty bottle, the motions of tossing the caber. “Old Hieland sports,” explained Dalmahoy, wiping tears of vain laughter: “his mother’s uncle was out in the ‘Forty-Five. Sorry to wake you, Ducie: balow, my babe!” It did not occur to me to smoke danger in this tomfoolery. I turned over and dozed again.

It seemed but a minute later that a buzzing in my ears awoke me, with a stab of pain as though my temples were being split with a wedge. On the instant I heard my name cried aloud, and sat up, to find myself blinking in a broad flood of moonlight over against the agitated face of Dalmahoy.

“Byfield – ” I began.

Dalmahoy pointed. The aëronaut lay at my feet, collapsed like some monstrous marionette, with legs and arms a-splay. Across his legs, with head propped against a locker, reclined Sheepshanks, and gazed upwards with an approving smile. “Awkward business,” explained Dalmahoy, between gasps. “Sheepshanks ’nmanageable; can’t carry his liquor like a gentleman: thought it funny ’pitch out ballast. Byfield lost his temper: worst thing in the world. One thing I pride myself, ’menable to reason. No holding Sheepshanks: Byfield got him down; too late; faint both of us. Sheepshanks wants ring for ’shistance: pulls string: breaks. When string breaks Lunardi won’t fall – tha’s the devil of it.”

“With my tol-de-rol,” Mr. Sheepshanks murmured. “Pretty – very pretty.”

I cast a look aloft. The Lunardi was transformed: every inch of it frosted as with silver. All the ropes and cords ran with silver too, or liquid mercury. And in the midst of this sparkling cage, a little below the hoop, and five feet at least above reach, dangled the broken valve-string.

“Well,” I said, “you have made a handsome mess of it! Pass me the broken end, and be good enough not to lose your head.”

“I wish I could,” he groaned, pressing it between his palms. “My dear sir, I’m not frightened, if that is your meaning.”

I was, and horribly. But the thing had to be done. The reader will perhaps forgive me for touching shyly on the next two or three minutes, which still recur on the smallest provocation and play bogey with my dreams. To balance on the edge of night, quaking, gripping a frozen rope; to climb, and feel the pit of one’s stomach slipping like a bucket in a fathomless well – I suppose the intolerable pains in my head spurred me to the attempt – these and the urgent shortness of my breathing – much as toothache will drive a man up to the dentist’s chair. I knotted the broken ends of the valve-string and slid back into the car: then tugged the valve open, while with my disengaged arm I wiped the sweat from my forehead. It froze upon the coat-cuff.

In a minute or so the drumming in my ears grew less violent. Dalmahoy bent over the aëronaut, who was bleeding at the nose and now began to breathe stertorously. Sheepshanks had fallen into placid slumber. I kept the valve open until we descended into a stratum of fog – from which, no doubt, the Lunardi had lately risen: the moisture collected here would account for its congelated coat of silver. By and by, still without rising, we were quit of the fog, and the moon swept the hollow beneath us, rescuing solitary scraps and sheets of water and letting them slip again like imprehensible ghosts. Small fiery eyes opened and shut on us; cressets of flame on factory chimneys, more and more frequent. I studied the compass. Our course lay south-by-west. But our whereabouts? Dalmahoy, being appealed to, suggested Glasgow: and thenceforward I let him alone. Byfield snored on.

I pulled out my watch, which I had forgotten to wind; and found it run down. The hands stood at twenty minutes past four. Daylight, then, could not be far off. Eighteen hours – say twenty: and Byfield had guessed our rate at one time to be thirty miles an hour. Five hundred miles —

A line of silver ahead: a ribbon drawn taut across the night, clean-edged, broadening – the sea! In a minute or two I caught the murmur of the coast. “Five hundred miles,” I began to reckon again, and a holy calm dawned on me as the Lunardi swept high over the fringing surf, and its voice faded back with the glimmer of a whitewashed fishing-haven.

I roused Dalmahoy and pointed. “The sea!”

“Looks like it. Which, I wonder?”

“The English Channel, man.”

“I say – are you sure?”

“Eh?” exclaimed Byfield, waking up and coming forward with a stagger.

“The English Channel.”

“The French fiddlestick,” said he with equal promptness.

“O, have it as you please!” I retorted. It was not worth arguing with the man.

“What is the hour?”

I told him that my watch had run down. His had done the same. Dalmahoy did not carry one. We searched the still prostrate Sheepshanks: his had stopped at ten minutes to four. Byfield replaced it and underlined his disgust with a kick.

“A nice lot!” he ejaculated. “I owe you my thanks, Mr. Ducie, all the same. It was touch and go with us, and my head’s none the better for it.”

“But I say,” expostulated Dalmahoy. “France! This is getting past a joke.”

“So you are really beginning to discover that, are you?”

Byfield stood, holding by a rope, and studied the darkness ahead. Beside him I hugged my convictions – hour after hour, it seemed; and still the dawn did not come.

He turned at length.

“I see a coast line to the south of us. This will be the Bristol Channel: and the balloon is sinking. Pitch out some ballast if these idiots have left any.”

I found a couple of sand bags and emptied them overboard. The coast, as a matter of fact, was close at hand. But the Lunardi rose in time to clear the cliff barrier by some hundreds of feet. A wild sea ran on it: of its surf, as of a grey and agonising face, we caught one glimpse as we hurled high and clear over the roar: and, a minute later, to our infinite dismay, were actually skimming the surface of a black hillside. “Hold on!” screamed Byfield, and I had barely time to tighten my grip when crash! the car struck the turf and pitched us together in a heap on the floor. Bump! the next blow shook us like peas in a bladder. I drew my legs up and waited for the third.

None came. The car gyrated madly and swung slowly back to equilibrium. We picked ourselves up, tossed rugs, coats, instruments, promiscuously overboard, and mounted again. The chine of the tall hill, our stumbling-block, fell back and was lost, and we swept forward into formless shadow.

“Confound it!” said Byfield, “the land can’t be uninhabited!”

It was, for aught we could see. Not a light showed anywhere; and to make things worse the moon had abandoned us. For one good hour we swept through chaos to the tuneless lamentations of Sheepshanks, who declared that his collar-bone was broken.

Then Dalmahoy flung a hand upwards. Night lay like a sack around and below us: but right aloft, at the zenith, day was trembling. Slowly established, it spread and descended upon us until it touched a distant verge of hills, and there, cut by the rim of the rising sun, flowed suddenly with streams of crimson.

“Over with the grapnel!” Byfield sprang to the valve-string and pulled; and the featureless earth rushed up towards us.

The sunlight through which we were falling had not touched it yet. It leaped on us, drenched in shadow, like some incalculable beast from its covert: a land shaggy with woods and coppices. Between the woods a desolate river glimmered. A colony of herons rose from the tree-tops beneath us and flew squawking for the farther shore.

“This won’t do,” said Byfield, and shut the escape. “We must win clear of these woods. Hullo!” Ahead of us the river widened abruptly into a shining estuary, populous with anchored shipping. Tall hills flanked it, and in the curve of the westernmost hill a grey town rose from the waterside: its terraces climbing, tier upon tier, like seats in an amphitheatre; its chimneys lifting their smoke over against the dawn. The tiers curved away southward to a round castle and a spit of rock, off which a brig under white canvas stood out for the line of the open sea.

We swept across the roadstead towards the town, trailing our grapnel as it were a hooked fish, a bare hundred feet above the water. Faces stared up at us from the ships’ decks. The crew of one lowered a boat to pursue; we were half a mile away before it touched the water. Should we clear the town? At Byfield’s orders we stripped off our overcoats and stood ready to lighten ship; but seeing that the deflected wind in the estuary was carrying us towards the suburbs and the harbour’s mouth, he changed his mind.

“It is devil or deep sea,” he announced. “We will try the grapnel. Look to it, Ducie, while I take the valve!” He pressed a clasp-knife into my hand. “Cut, if I give the word.”

We descended a few feet. We were skimming the ridge. The grapnel touched, and, in the time it takes you to wink, had ploughed through a kitchen garden, uprooting a regiment of currant bushes; had leaped clear and was caught in the eaves of a wooden outhouse, fetching us up with a dislocating shock. I heard a rending noise, and picked myself up in time to see the building collapse like a house of cards, and a pair of demented pigs emerge from the ruins and plunge across the garden-beds. And with that I was pitched off my feet again as the hook caught in an iron chevaux-de-frise, and held fast.

“Hold tight!” shouted Byfield, as the car lurched and struggled, careering desperately. “Don’t cut, man! What the devil!”

Our rope had tautened over the coping of a high stone wall; and the straining Lunardi– a very large and handsome blossom, bending on a very thin stalk – overhung a gravelled yard; and lo! from the centre of it stared up at us, rigid with amazement, the faces of a squad of British red-coats!