DANGERS OF BALLOONING
low — not over 300 yards above the tree-tops. Now, as we sank lower, we had a real fright. Would not the guide rope at least curl itself around some tree and hold us there for hours? So we struggled to maintain our altitude above the tree-tops, until all at once a queer little wind gust took us over the Vincennes racecourse.
"Now is our time!" I exclaimed to my companions. "Hold fast!"
With this I pulled on the valve rope, and we came down with celerity but scarcely any shock.
Personally, I have felt not only fear but also pain and real despair in a spherical balloon. It has not been often, because no sport is more regularly safe and mild and pleasurable. Such real dangers as it has are confined usually to the landing, and the balloonist of experience knows how to meet them; while from its imaginary dangers in the air one is regularly very safe. Therefore the particular adventure, full of pain and fear, that I recall to mind was all the more remarkable in that it occurred in high altitude.
It happened at Nice in 1900, when I went up
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