THE FUTURE OF AIR-SHIPS.
447
captain sleeps? The whole idea of the aerial yacht is contained in the answer.
My guests may remain at ease while I take my turn at sleeping. The aerial yacht is not designed for high speed. Therefore its balloon need not be cylindrical. I am even making it egg-shaped ; consequently the skilled labour and unremitting attention required for the maintenance of a cylindrical form by means of interworking ventilators and valves will not be needed. In this respect, indeed, the aerial yacht can, for hours at a time, be made to assemble very closely a spherical balloon, its motor being stopped, and the system being allowed to float gently through the night—or afternoon or morning—on a favourable air current. The labours of my guests will be limited to a common-sense opening and closing of a faucet as the balloon obviously falls or rises.
We shall do a great deal of such reposeful gliding on favourable currents, floating onward at no great height above the earth, but atterly free from the guide-roping nuisance. For us there will be no darting up into the frigid solitudes above the clouds, no falling into dank mists—after the fashion of spherical balloonists. Nor will there be the strain for speed, or the pressure preoccupation incident to ordinary air-ship flights. A proper handling of the faucets will secure us the level altitude we desire ; and we shall float on, watching the great map of Europe unroll beneath us!
We shall dine. We shall watch the stars rise. We shall hang between the constellations and the earth.
We shall awake to the glory of the morning.
So day shall succeed to day. We shall pass frontiers. Now we are over Russia—it would be a pity to stop—let us make a loop and return by way of Hungary and Austria. Here is Vienna! Let us set the propeller working full speed to change our course. Perhaps we shall fall in with a current that will take us to Belgrade ?
And now that it is morning again, let us ride on this breeze as far as Constantinople ! We shall have time, and shall find means to return to Paris !
IV.
The obvious advantage of an egg-shaped, dirigible balloon under slight interior pressure, and furnished with my steam heating system is, of course, its ability to remain thirty days in the air where the ordinary spherical balloon can stay but one day.
Had André possessed it, he might have started off with serious
