d brought her head away from the wind. In
an instant I had shot out of the eddies and was skimming down the sky.
Then, shaken but victorious, I turned her nose up and began once more
my steady grind on the upward spiral. I took a large sweep to avoid
the danger-spot of the whirlpool, and soon I was safely above it. Just
after one o'clock I was twenty-one thousand feet above the sea-level.
To my great joy I had topped the gale, and with every hundred feet of
ascent the air grew stiller. On the other hand, it was very cold, and
I was conscious of that peculiar nausea which goes with rarefaction of
the air. For the first time I unscrewed the mouth of my oxygen bag and
took an occasional whiff of the glorious gas. I could feel it running
like a cordial through my veins, and I was exhilarated almost to the
point of drunkenness. I shouted and sang as I soared upwards into the
cold, still outer world.

"It is very clear to me that the insensibility which came upon
Glaisher, and in a lesser degree upon Coxwell, when, in 1862, they
ascended in a balloon to the height of thirty thousand feet, was due to
the extreme speed with which a perpendicular ascent is made. Doing it
at an easy gradient and accustoming oneself to the lessened barometric
pressure by slow degrees, there are no such dreadful symptoms. At the
same great height I found that even without my oxygen inhaler I could
breathe without undue distress. It was bitterly cold, however, and my
thermometer was at zero, Fahrenheit. At one-thirty I was nearly seven
miles above the surface of the earth, and still ascending steadily. I
found, however, that the rarefied air was giving markedly less support
to my planes, and that my angle of ascent had to be considerably
lowered in consequence. It was already clear that even with my light
weight and strong engine-power there was a point in front of me where I
should be held. To make matters worse, one of my sparking-plugs was in
trouble again and there was intermittent misfiring in the engine. My
heart was heavy with the fear of failure.

"It was about that time that I had a most extraordinary experience.
Something whizzed past me in a trail of smoke and exploded with a loud,
hissing sound, sending forth a cloud of steam. For the instant I could
not imagine what had happened. Then I remembered that the earth is for
ever being bombarded by meteor stones, and would be hardly inhabitable
were they not in nearly every case