, that stood braced at an angle of about forty-five
degrees between the courtyard wall above and the roof of a lower
construction farther down. The keel, in spite of my weight, that
of the motor and machinery, and the shock it had received in
falling, resisted wonderfully. The thin pine scantlings and piano
wires of Nice (the town where the idea of a keel first suggested
itself) had saved my life!

After what seemed tedious waiting, I saw a rope being lowered to
me from the roof above. I held to it and was hauled up, when I
perceived my rescuers to be the brave firemen of Paris. From
their station at Passy they had been watching the flight of the
airship. They had seen my fall and immediately hastened to the
spot. Then, having rescued me, they proceeded to rescue the
airship.

The operation was painful. The remains of the balloon envelope
and the suspension wires hung lamentably; and it was impossible
to disengage them except in strips and fragments!

The later balloon "No. VI." with which Santos-Dumont won the Deutsch
prize may fairly be taken as his conception of the finished type of
dirigible for one man. In fact his aspirations never soared as high
as those of Count Zeppelin, and the largest airship he ever
planned--called "the _Omnibus_"--carried only four men. It is
probable that the diversion of his interest from dirigibles to
airplanes had most to do with his failure to carry his development
further than he did. "No. VI." was 108 feet long, and 20 feet in
diameter with an eighteen-horse-power gasoline engine which could
drive it at about nineteen miles an hour. Naturally the aeronaut's
first thought in his new construction was of the valves. The memory
of the anxious minutes spent perched on the window-sill of the
Trocadero Hotel or dangling like a spider at the end of the
firemen's rope were still fresh. The ballonet which had failed him
in "No. V." was perfected in its successor. Notwithstanding the care
with which she was constructed the prize-winner turned out to be a
rather unlucky ship. On her trial voyage she ran into a tree and was
damaged, and even on the day of her greatest conquest she behaved
badly. The test was made on October 1, 1901. The aeronaut had
rounded the Tower finely and was making for home when the motor
began to miss and threatened to stop altogether. While Santos-Dumont
was tinkering with the engine, lea