THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.
"I had seen motors ´jump` along the highway. What would mine do in its little basket ?"
It is also a reason why air-ship captains will always prefer to navigate, for their own pleasure, in calm weather, and, when they find an air-current against them, will steer obliquely upward or downward to get out of it. Birds do the same thing. The sailing yachtsman whistles for a fair breeze, without which he can do nothing ; but the river-steamboat captain will always hug the shore to avoid the freshet, and will time his descent of the river by the outgoing rather than the incoming tide. We air-shipmen are steamboat captains and not sailing yachtsmen.
The navigator of the air has this one great advantage—he can leave one current for another. The atmosphere above us is full of varying currents. Mounting, he will find an advantageous breeze if not a calm. These are strictly practical considerations, having nothing to do with the air-ship's ability to battle with the breeze when obliged to do it.
Before going on my first trip, I had wondered if I should be seasick. I foresaw that the sensation of mounting and descending obliquely with my shifting weights might be unpleasant ; and I looked forward to a good deal of pitching (tangage), as they say on board ship. Of rolling there would not be so much ; but both sensations would be novel in ballooning, for the spherical balloon gives no sensation of movement at all.
In my first air-ship, however, the suspension was very long, approximating that of a spherical balloon. For this reason there was very little pitching. And, speaking generally, since that time, though I have been told that on this or that trip my airship pitched considerably, I have never been seasick. It may be due in part to the fact that I am rarely subject to this ill upon the water.
I know that what one feels most distressingly at sea is not so much the movement as that momentary hesitation just before the boat pitches, followed by the malicious dipping or mounting, which never comes quite the same, and the shock at top and bottom. All this is powerfully aided by the smells of the paint, varnish, tar, mingled with the odours of the kitchen, the heat of the boilers, and the stench of the smoke and the hold.
In the air-ship there is no smell—all is pure and clean ; and the pitching itself has none of the shocks and hesitations of the boat at sea. The movement is suave and flowing, which is doubtless owing to the lesser resistance of the air-waves. The pitches are less frequent and rapid than
