The Balloonist Read Online Free Page B

outward events. And it is clear too that in this odd document the past and present must mingle, like layers of warmer and colder water merging gradually in a sea. Each sensation, in the instant it is perceived, becomes a recollection. And between near and far recollections there is little to choose. Luisa in the drawing room in Quai d’Orléans, Theodor only a metre away from me in the gondola—one is real and the other only a kind of ephemeral Magic Lantern projected on those brain fibers crawling with electricity. But which? I have only to close my eyes and they blur and merge, the profile at certain angles of the head is the same, his contempt is her pale chastity, his courage her quickness to anger. Do I know for a certainty—I ask myself—that this feel of the instrument ring under my gloved hand is a fact, and that the smell of a sun-warmed cab horse, the clop of hoofs on an avenue in the Bois, are memories? For the feel of the instrument ring too becomes a memory, in the very instant that I seek to grasp and comprehend it.

    Probably not everybody shares these little difficulties. It is my strength and my weakness—I have finally come to realise—that I have a strong sense of the presence of the invisible, that forces unseen by others are quite real and present to me. Certainly Waldemer has no difficulty dealing with the external world. He himself is a part of it, solidly three-dimensional against the whitish background of the horizon. There is no question whether he is in Paris or here in the gondola. Just now he is developing the plate from the photograph he took at the time of our departure. Although he is only a recent initiate to the mysteries of photography, he is already adept at it and speaks knowledgeably of its chemistry, preferring for development the recently discovered alkaline process using pyrogallic acid, which permits exposures of a fifth of a second or less. Just now he, or at least his head and shoulders,are underneath a little tent of black cloth which he has erected over the opened portmanteau and its contents. Inside, he is carefully sloshing the plate in a tray of pyrogallol with potassium bromide, then fixing it in a solution of hyposulphite of soda, then meticulously washing it for several minutes in fresh water. Now he emerges into the daylight with the plate gripped carefully by the corners, holding it between himself and the sun in order to look through it: but the pose, a hieratic one, suggests that he is holding it up to this solar deity for inspection or perhaps for commendation.
    â€œHa! Well, the range was a little extreme, as I thought. Still—”
    He hangs it up in the rigging by a pair of clips provided for the purpose. He is not quite satisfied with it, yet he is satisfied with it. Just doing something requiring this quantity of apparatus, and this degree of specialized knowledge, is a satisfaction to Waldemer. Like many or most Americans—undoubtedly the reason for the success of that remarkable nation—he feels obliged to be doing something at all times. A sigh or two of satisfaction, a glance around the horizon, and he is squinting into the theodolite which Theodor has left mounted on the instrument ring. He puts the canvas cover back on the instrument.
    â€œI make out our course to be north by east a half east.”
    â€œVery good.”
    â€œHard to tell now though, because the guide ropes are out of the water and you can’t sight along them. The sun has come up out of the mist and is warming the gas, and that’s made us rise. We could use that handful of ballast we threw away now.
    This is self-evident.
    â€œHallo, it’s eight o’clock. About time for a little breakfast, I think. I’d be glad to fix it.”
    He is right on all counts. The sun has climbed out of the hazy ring around the horizon and is glowing more warmly now, with a kind of swimming on the surface if you look at it directly. Penetrated by