Free Jules Verne by Robur the Conqueror Page A

account
the altitude necessary to clear the summits of the high lands in the
district. But as the aeronef was rapidly nearing a mountainous
country, it was only prudent to keep a good lookout, in case some
slight deviation from the course became necessary.
    Looking at the country beneath them, Uncle Prudent and Phil Evans
noticed a large lake, whose lower southern end the "Albatross" had
just reached. They concluded, therefore, that during the night the
whole length of Lake Erie had been traversed, and that, as they were
going due west, they would soon be over Lake Michigan. "There can be
no doubt of it," said Phil Evans, "and that group of roofs on the
horizon is Chicago."
    He was right. It was indeed the city from which the seventeen
railways diverge, the Queen of the West, the vast reservoir into
which flow the products of Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Missouri, and
all the States which form the western half of the Union.
    Uncle Prudent, through an excellent telescope he had found in his
cabin, easily recognized the principal buildings. His colleague
pointed out to him the churches and public edifices, the numerous
"elevators" or mechanical, granaries, and the huge Sherman Hotel,
whose windows seemed like a hundred glittering points on each of its
faces.
    "If that is Chicago," said Uncle Prudent, "it is obvious that we are
going farther west than is convenient for us if we are to return to
our starting-place."
    And, in fact, the "Albatross" was traveling in a straight line from
the Pennsylvania capital.
    But if Uncle Prudent wished to ask Robur to take him eastwards he
could not then do so. That morning the engineer did not leave his
cabin. Either he was occupied in some work, or else he was asleep,
and the two colleagues sat down to breakfast without seeing him.
    The speed was the same as that during last evening. The wind being
easterly the rate was not interfered with at all, and as the
thermometer only falls a degree centigrade for every seventy meters
of elevation the temperature was not insupportable. And so, in
chatting and thinking and waiting for the engineer, Uncle Prudent and
Phil Evans walked about beneath the forest of screws, whose gyratory
movement gave their arms the appearance of semi-diaphanous disks.
    The State of Illinois was left by its northern frontier in less than
two hours and a half; and they crossed the Father of Waters, the
Mississippi, whose double-decked steam-boats seemed no bigger than
canoes. Then the "Albatross" flew over Iowa after having sighted Iowa
City about eleven o'clock in the morning.
    A few chains of hills, "bluffs" as they are called, curved across the
face of the country trending from the south to the northwest, whose
moderate height necessitated no rise in the course of the aeronef.
Soon the bluffs gave place to the large plains of western Iowa and
Nebraska—immense prairies extending all the way to the foot of the
Rocky Mountains. Here and there were many rios, affluents or minor
affluents of the Missouri. On their banks were towns and villages,
growing more scattered as the "Albatross" sped farther west.
    Nothing particular happened during this day. Uncle Prudent and Phil
Evans were left entirely to themselves. They hardly noticed Frycollin
sprawling at full length in the bow, keeping his eyes shut so that he
could see nothing. And they were not attacked by vertigo, as might
have been expected. There was no guiding mark, and there was nothing
to cause the vertigo, as there would have been on the top of a lofty
building. The abyss has no attractive power when it is gazed at from
the car of a balloon or deck of an aeronef. It is not an abyss that
opens beneath the aeronaut, but an horizon that rises round him on
all sides like a cup.
    In a couple of hours the "Albatross" was over Omaha, on the Nebraskan
frontier—Omaha City, the real head of the Pacific Railway, that
long line of rails, four thousand five hundred miles in length,
stretching from New York to San Francisco. For a