The Balloonist Read Online Free

The Balloonist
Book: The Balloonist Read Online Free
Author: MacDonald Harris
Tags: FIC000000, FIC019000, FIC002000
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and a stream of fine lead shot slithers downward with a hiss. Almost at the same instant the gondola strikes the water with a heavy, almost metallic sound. We are thrown sideway against each other and keep our balance only with difficulty. Waldemer gropes for the ballast string again but I reach for his arm and restrain it. The gondola touches the sea once more, not quite so heavily this time, and this last contact with the terrestrial sphere seems to lend it force. The Prinzess lifts a little, hesitates and descends, and then begins to climb again. The guide ropes lift evenly up until only about a third of their length is still trailing in the water.
    Waldemer catches my eye and shakes his head, smiling now, but still panting a little from the excitement.
    â€œThe vixen! She almost gave us a bath before we were decently off!”
    Theodor says nothing. The camp behind us and the semicircle of watchers are almost invisible now. On the beach we can make out the sheds and, barely detectable in front of them, some pinpoints and variegated spots, our last glimpse of human beings. The ship in the harbour is a toy. To the northeast I see land I have previously known only from the chart: the end of the Vasa Peninsula, Vogelsang and the other outlying islands. Waldemer suddenly remembers something. He opens the leather portmanteau and unlimbers his photographic apparatus: a large oaken box with a goggle on the front of it, the tripod, and a number of plates with their holders. He unwraps the tinfoil from a plate and throws it overboard, and it sinks downward with an odd slowness like a silver bird. The plate snaps in and out of the slot. Like all specialists he grumbles at his tools. “At that range of course … And from a moving platform.” What will show on the plate are some flyspecks. But his journalist’s instinct is satisfied and our departure is recorded for posterity, insofar as posterity reads the
Aftonbladet
and the
New York Herald
. Theodor has mounted the theodolite and is taking a final bearing of the camp to verify our course. He inclines the tube downward, adjusts it to align exactly on the camp, reads the bearing of the azimuth ring, and makes an entry in his notebook. It seems incredible that we are off at last. I open my own pocket diary, find thepage “12 juli,” and write, “0501 GMT. Ascent from Dane Island. Wind S. 8kt., sky clear.”

    My emotions are complicated and not readily verifiable. I feel a vast yearning that is simultaneously a pleasure and a pain, like a desire for a woman. I am certain of the consummation of this yearning, but I don’t know yet what form it will take, since I do not understand quite what it is that the yearning desires. For the first time there is borne in upon me the full truth of what I myself said to the doctor only an hour ago: that my motives in this undertaking are not entirely clear. For years, for a lifetime, the machinery of my destiny has worked in secret to prepare for this moment, its clockwork has moved exactly toward this time and place and no other. Rising slowly from the earth that bore me and gave me sustenance, I am carried helplessly toward an uninhabited and hostile, or at best indifferent, part of the earth, littered with the bones of explorers and the wrecks of ships, frozen supply caches, messages scrawled with chilled fingers and hidden in cairns that no eye will ever see. Nobody has succeeded in this thing and many have died. Yet in freely willing this enterprise, in choosing this moment and no other when the south wind will carry me exactly northward at a velocity of eight knots, I have converted the machinery of my fate into the servant of my will. All this I understand, as I understand each detail of the technique by which this is carried out. What I don’t understand is why I am so intent on going to this particular place. Who wants the North Pole! What good is it! Can you eat it? Will it carry you from Gothenburg
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