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year, hardly one will be gathered from a soil completely drained of its
strength. Then, Africa will be there to offer to new races the treasures
that for centuries have been accumulating in her breast. Those climates now
so fatal to strangers will be purified by cultivation and by drainage of the
soil, and those scattered water supplies will be gathered into one common
bed to form an artery of navigation. Then this country over which we are
now passing, more fertile, richer, and fuller of vitality than the rest,
will become some grand realm where more astonishing discoveries than steam
and electricity will be brought to light."
"Ah! sir," said Joe, "I'd like to see all that."
Five Weeks in a Balloon
CHAPTER SIXTEENTH.
59
"You got up too early in the morning, my boy!"
"Besides," said Kennedy, "that may prove to be a very dull period when
industry will swallow up every thing for its own profit. By dint of
inventing machinery, men will end in being eaten up by it! I have always
fancied that the end of the earth will be when some enormous boiler, heated
to three thousand millions of atmospheric pressure, shall explode and blow up
our Globe!"
"And I add that the Americans," said Joe, "will not have been the last to
work at the machine!"
"In fact," assented the doctor, "they are great boilermakers! But, without
allowing ourselves to be carried away by such speculations, let us rest
content with enjoying the beauties of this country of the Moon, since we
have been permitted to see it."
The sun, darting his last rays beneath the masses of heapedup cloud, adorned
with a crest of gold the slightest inequalities of the ground below;
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gigantic trees, arborescent bushes, mosses on the even surfaceall had their
share of this luminous effulgence. The soil, slightly undulating, here and
there rose into little conical hills; there were no mountains visible on the
horizon; immense brambly palisades, impenetrable hedges of thorny jungle,
separated the clearings dotted with numerous villages, and immense
euphorbiae surrounded them with natural fortifications, interlacing their
trunks with the coralshaped branches of the shrubbery and undergrowth.
Ere long, the Malagazeri, the chief tributary of Lake Tanganayika, was seen
winding between heavy thickets of verdure, offering an asylum to many
watercourses that spring from the torrents formed in the season of freshets,
or from ponds hollowed in the clayey soil. To observers looking from a
height, it was a chain of waterfalls thrown across the whole western face of
the country.
Animals with huge humps were feeding in the luxuriant prairies, and were
half hidden, sometimes, in the tall grass; spreading forests in bloom
redolent of spicy perfumes presented themselves to the gaze like immense
bouquets; but, in these bouquets, lions, leopards, hyenas, and tigers, were
then crouching for shelter from the last hot rays of the setting sun. From
time to time, an elephant made the tall tops of the undergrowth sway to and
fro, and you could hear the crackling of huge branches as his ponderous
ivory tusks broke them in his way.
"What a sporting country!" exclaimed Dick, unable longer to restrain his
enthusiasm; "why, a single ball fired at random into those forests would
bring down game worthy of it. Suppose we try it once!"
"No, my dear Dick; the night is close at handa threatening night with a
tempest in the backgroundand the storms are awful in this country, where the
heated soil is like one vast electric battery."
"You are right, sir," said Joe, "the heat has got to be enough to choke one,
and the breeze has died away. One can feel that something's coming."
"The atmosphere is saturated with electricity," replied the doctor; "every
living creature is sensible that this state of the air portends a struggle of
the elements, and I confess that I never before was so full of the fluid
myself."
"Well, then," suggested Dick, "would it not be advisable to alight?"
"On the contrary, Dick, I'd rather go up, only that I am afraid of being
carried out of my course by these countercurrents contending in the
atmosphere."
Five Weeks in a Balloon
CHAPTER SIXTEENTH.
60
"Have you any idea, then, of abandoning the route that we have followed
since we left the coast?"
"If I can manage to do so," replied the doctor, "I will turn more directly
northward, by from seven to eight degrees; I shall then endeavor to ascend
toward the presumed latitudes of the sources of the Nile; perhaps we may
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