Falling Upwards. Richard Holmes
rope until it was skimming ‘nearly over their heads’. He then urged Mason to shout down through the speaking trumpet ‘alternately in French and German’, as if some supernatural power was visiting them from on high. The ironworkers were being visited by the gods of the air.
Mason complacently imagined how this aeronautical trick must have ‘struck terror’ into even the boldest hearts and wisest heads of the ‘honest artizans’ beneath: ‘Catching alone the rays of the light that preceded from the artificial fire-work that was suspended close beneath us, the balloon, the only part of the machine visible to them, presented the aspect of a huge ball of fire, slowly and steadily traversing the sky, at such a distance as to preclude the possibility of it being mistaken for any of the ordinary productions of Nature …’17
As the Bengal light went out, they completed this supernatural effect by emptying half a bag of ballast sand directly onto the upturned faces a hundred feet below. Then the balloon sailed silently and invisibly away, leaving behind the puzzled tribe of Belgian foundry workers staring uncomprehendingly upwards, as these mysterious superior intelligences disappeared. ‘Lost in astonishment, and drawn together by their mutual fears,’ Mason concluded, ‘they stood no doubt looking up at the object of their terrors.’18 So the gods were also treating the ironworkers as if they were some primitive tribe.
Mason’s account of the voyage, Aeronautica, has several illustrations, views and cloudscapes, among them a very strange, dramatic one entitled ‘Balloon over Liège at Night’, taken from an imaginary point outside the basket looking across at the crew. Their faces are weirdly illuminated by the Davy lamp hung from the balloon hoop. The curving river Meuse, and the blazing foundries, are visible in the darkness below.
After midnight it was the crew’s own turn to be alarmed. Gradually all human lights on the ground disappeared. The moonless night seemed to close in around them, encircling them completely, even from below. It was an increasingly disturbing sensation. ‘The sky seemed almost black with the intensity of night … the stars shone like sparks of the whitest silver scattered upon the jetty dome around us. Occasionally faint flashes of lightning would for an instant illuminate the horizon … Not a single object of terrestrial nature could anywhere be distinguished; an unfathomable abyss of “darkness visible” seemed to encompass us on every side.’19
What was so frightening and disorientating was that the darkness seemed increasingly solid. Gone was the classic balloon feel of airy vistas, glowing luminosity and huge benign openness. The night was thickening into an alien substance. It was menacing and claustrophobic, entrapping and imprisoning them. Mason records no conversation with Green or Hollond at this time, but afterwards tried to describe what were clearly shared sensations: ‘A black, plunging chasm was around us on all sides, and as we tried to penetrate this mysterious gulf, we could not prevent the idea coming into our heads that we were cutting a path through an immense block of black marble by which we were enveloped, and which, a solid mass a few inches away from us seemed to melt as we drew near, so that it might allow us to penetrate even further into its cold and dark embrace.’20
The idea of the men being thrust into or entombed in ‘an immense block of black marble’, and held there forever in its ‘cold and dark embrace’, is strangely unsettling. Is it a shivering anticipation of the Victorian horror of being buried alive; or even of some nightmare of sexual entrapment? The passage is curiously reminiscent of some of the later horror stories of Edgar Allan Poe, such as ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. In fact it is highly likely that Poe read this very description as soon as it was published, for it turns out that he was following the accounts of Green’s balloon adventures very closely from the other side of the Atlantic.
4
The year before Green’s epic flight, Edgar Allan Poe had written one of the earliest of his fantasy stories, ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall’, published in the mass-circulation newspaper the New York Sun in June 1835. It is a highly technical and perversely well-imagined account of a successful ascent to the moon – in a home-made balloon of ‘extraordinary dimensions’, containing forty thousand cubic feet of gas.21
Pfaall’s lengthy preparations are given in great detail, his equipment including a specialised telescope, barometer, thermometer, speaking trumpet, ‘etc etc etc’, but also a bell, a stick of sealing wax, tins of pemmican, ‘a pair of pigeons and a cat’. Immediately upon launching, an explosion leaves him hanging upside down from a rope beneath the balloon basket. This proves to be a typically Poe-like state of horrific suspension (‘I wondered … at the horrible blackness of my finger-nails’) which would often be repeated in later stories.
Ingeniously recovering himself by hooking his belt buckle to the rim of the basket, Hans describes how his balloon, ascending ‘with a velocity prodigiously accelerating’, rapidly overtakes the record height achieved by ‘Messieurs Gay-Lussac and Biot’. He soon crosses ‘the definite limit to the atmosphere’. On the way he has another Poe-like vision into the centre of a stormcloud: ‘My hair stood on end, while I gazed afar down within the yawning abysses, letting imagination descend and stalk about in the strange vaulted halls, and ruddy gulfs, and red ghastly chasms of hideous and unfathomable fire.’
Hans succeeds in breaking out of the earth’s gravitational field, and uses a patent ‘air-condenser’ to breathe. But his ears ache and his nose bleeds. During nineteen days and nights, he observes the steadily retreating surface of the planet, gradually reduced to a curving globe of gleaming blue oceans and white polar ice caps: ‘The view of the earth, at this period of my ascension, was beautiful indeed … a boundless sheet of unruffled ocean … the entire Atlantic coasts of France and Spain … of individual edifices not a trace could be discovered, the proudest cities of mankind had utterly faded away from the face of the earth …’
He eventually floats upwards into the moon’s gravitational sphere, and begins to drift into lunar orbit. At this point the balloon turns round and begins a rapid descent towards the lunar surface. After landing, the balloonist is surrounded by an aggressive mob of small, ugly-looking creatures, ‘grinning in a ludicrous manner, and eyeing me and my balloon askance, with their arms set akimbo’.
After desultory greetings and unsatisfactory conversations, Hans turns from them ‘in contempt’, and lifts his eyes longingly above the lunar horizon. The version of ‘earthrise’ which follows is one of the most hauntingly poetic passages in the entire story. ‘Gazing upwards at the earth so lately left, and left perhaps forever, [Hans] beheld it like a huge, dull, copper shield, about two degrees in diameter, fixed immovably in the heavens overhead, and tipped on one of its edges with a crescent border of the most brilliant gold.’
Poe’s final, delicate irony is that the moon creatures do not believe the earth is inhabited. They think Hans Pfaall is a great and inveterate liar. And when, after a five-year lunar sojourn, he somehow contrives to get a message taken back across space by ‘an inhabitant of the Moon’ to the earth, addressed to the ‘States’ College of Astronomers in the city of Rotterdam’, they in turn dismiss Hans as a ‘drunken villain’, and his missive as ‘a hoax’. Poe’s readers are sardonically asked to draw their own conclusions.
Within less than a decade, Poe would return to the subject of balloons and amazing flights. This first pioneering tale, written when he was only twenty-six, is evidently inspired by Cyrano de Bergerac’s Histoire comique. But its technical originality and brilliance, its mixture of scientific realism and metaphysical terrors, suggests the wholly new dimension of science fiction.22
5
Perhaps to counter just such metaphysical terrors, somewhere towards 1 a.m. Green allowed the balloon to sink until the long trail rope, though invisible, was again reassuringly in touch with the ground. They minimised the flame of their overhead