Free The Eternal Adam and other stories by Jules Vernes Page A

hesitate! No. The higher we go, the more glorious
will be our death!’
    The balloon being now entirely relieved of
ballast and of all it contained, we were carried to an enormous height. It
vibrated in the atmosphere. The least noise resounded in the vaults of heaven.
Our globe, the only object which caught my view in immensity, seemed ready to
be annihilated, and above us the depths of the starry skies were lost in thick
darkness.
    I saw my companion rise up before me.
    ‘The hour is come!’ he said. ‘We must die.
We are rejected of men. They despise us. Let us crush them!’
    ‘Mercy!’ I cried.
    ‘Let us cut these cords! Let this car be
abandoned in space. The attractive force will change its direction, and we
shall approach the sun!’
    Despair galvanised me. I threw myself upon
the madman, we struggled together, and a terrible conflict took place. But I
was thrown down, and while he held me under his knee, the madman was cutting
the cords of the car.
    ‘One!’ he cried.
    ‘My God!’
    ‘Two! Three!’
    I made a superhuman effort, rose up, and
violently repulsed the madman.
    ‘Four!’
    The car fell, but I instinctively clung to
the cords and hoisted myself into the meshes of the netting.
    The madman disappeared in space!
    The balloon was raised to an immeasurable
height. A horrible cracking was heard. The gas, too much dilated, had burst the
balloon. I shut my eyes —
    Some instants after, a damp warmth revived
me. I was in the midst of clouds on fire. The balloon turned over with dizzy
velocity. Taken by the wind, it made a hundred leagues an hour in a horizontal
course, the lightning flashing around it.
    Meanwhile my fall was not a very rapid one.
When I opened my eyes, I saw the country. I was two miles from the sea, and the
tempest was driving me violently towards it, when an abrupt shock forced me to
loosen my hold. My hands opened, a cord slipped swiftly between my fingers, and
I found myself on the solid earth!
    It was the cord of the anchor, which,
sweeping along the surface of the ground, was caught in a crevice; and my
balloon, unballasted for the last time, careered off to lose itself beyond the
sea.
    When I came to myself, I was in bed in a
peasant’s cottage, at Harderwick, a village of La Gueldre, fifteen leagues from
Amsterdam, on the shores of the Zuyder-Zee.
    A miracle had saved my life, but my voyage
had been a series of imprudences, committed by a lunatic, and I had not been
able to prevent them.
    May this terrible narrative, though
instructing those who read it, not discourage the explorers of the air.
     

Master Zacharius

1 -A Winter Night
    The city of Geneva lies at the west end of
the lake of the same name. The Rhone, which passes through the town at the
outlet of the lake, divides it into two sections, and is itself divided in the
centre of the city by an island placed in mid-stream. A topographical feature
like this is often found in the great depots of commerce and industry. No doubt
the first inhabitants were influenced by the easy means of transport which the
swift currents of the rivers offered them – those ‘roads which walk along of
their own accord,’ as Pascal puts it. In the case of the Rhone, it would be the
road that ran along.
    Before new and regular buildings were
constructed on this island, which was enclosed like a Dutch galley in the
middle of the river, the curious mass of houses, piled one on the other,
presented a delightfully confused coup-d’œil . The small area of the
island had compelled some of the buildings to be perched, as it were, on the
piles, which were entangled in the rough currents of the river. The huge beams,
blackened by time, and worn by the water, seemed like the claws of an enormous
crab, and presented a fantastic appearance. The little yellow streams, which
were like cobwebs stretched amid this ancient foundation, quivered in the
darkness, as if they had been the leaves of some old oak forest, while the
river engulfed in this forest of