In a couple of hours we had passed the ranges, which must have been some
hundred and fifty miles across, and again I saw a tract of level plain
extending far away to the horizon. I knew not where we were, and dared
not descend, lest I should waste the power of the balloon, but I was half
hopeful that we might be above the country from which I had originally
started. I looked anxiously for any sign by which I could recognise it,
but could see nothing, and feared that we might be above some distant
part of Erewhon, or a country inhabited by savages. While I was still in
doubt, the balloon was again wrapped in clouds, and we were left to blank
space and to conjectures.
The weary time dragged on. How I longed for my unhappy watch! I felt as
though not even time was moving, so dumb and spell-bound were our
surroundings. Sometimes I would feel my pulse, and count its beats for
half-an-hour together; anything to mark the time--to prove that it was
there, and to assure myself that we were within the blessed range of its
influence, and not gone adrift into the timelessness of eternity.
I had been doing this for the twentieth or thirtieth time, and had fallen
into a light sleep: I dreamed wildly of a journey in an express train,
and of arriving at a railway station where the air was full of the sound
of locomotive engines blowing off steam with a horrible and tremendous
hissing; I woke frightened and uneasy, but the hissing and crashing
noises pursued me now that I was awake, and forced me to own that they
were real.
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