I must
tell you that little Dick was very much interested about this, and he
remembered that he had seen, in a place where the sun was shining, the
water going back from the earth to the clouds. "It went up in streaks," he
said, "and I saw it quite plainly."
Generally we look up at the clouds, but I remember once looking down and
seeing them below me. I had climbed a high mountain, and just when I got to
the top it happened that the peak was quite clear, but around it, a little
lower down, a wreath of white cloud was floating. Every now and then,
through a rift in the cloud, I could see the beautiful valley below, with
its smiling fields and winding river, and far away there was the sea, with
hundreds of green islands; all this I saw for a moment, as if through a
soft thin veil, and then the cloud closed again, and shut out the view.
I can quite understand travellers saying how lovely it is when they sail
through the air in balloons, to get up into a clear still height, and see
the "plains of clouds" below them. But there is one thing which makes
voyages in balloons dangerous. The higher people go, the more thin and
difficult to breathe the air becomes. One celebrated traveller, when he
had got as high as seven miles in his balloon, lost his senses, and his
companion was nearly frozen to death by the piercing cold. This traveller
tells us that about six or seven miles above the earth no sound can reach
the ear to break the perfect stillness and silence.
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