Careers of Danger and Daring Part 7

"If you get too much air, pull once on the hose," somebody calls; "if you don't get enough, pull twice." I wonder how I am to know whether I am getting too much or not enough, but there is no time to find out. I have just a moment for one deep breath from the outside, when there is no more "outside" for me; the face-gla.s.s has shut it off, and now grimy fingers are turning this gla.s.s in its threads, turning it hard, and hands are fussing with hose and life-line, making them fast to lugs on the helmet-face, one on each side, so that the hose drops away under my left arm, and the life-line under my right. Then I feel a sharp tap on my big copper crown, which means I must start down. That is the signal.

I pause a moment to see if I can breathe, and find I can. One step downward, and I feel a tug at my trousers as the air-feed plumps them out. Step by step I enter the water; foot by foot the river rises to my waist, to my shoulders--to my head. With a roar in my ears, and a flash of silver bubbles, I sink beneath the surface; I reach the ladder's end, loose my hold on it, and sink, sink through an amber-colored region, slowly, easily, and land safely (thanks to Atkinson's careful handling) on the barge's deck just outside her combings, and can reach one heavy foot over the depth of her hold, where tons of coal await rescue. A jerk comes on the life-line, and I answer that all is well; indeed, I am pleasantly disappointed, thus far, in my sensations. It is true there is a pressure in my ears, but nothing of consequence (no doubt deeper it would have been different), and I feel rather a sense of exhilaration from my air-supply than any inconvenience. At every breath the whole suit heaves and settles with the lift and fall of my lungs. I carry my armor easily. It seems as if I have no weight at all, yet the scales would give me close to four hundred pounds.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE AUTHOR AFTER HIS FIRST DIVE. THE FACE-PLATE HAS BEEN UNSCREWED FROM THE HELMET.]

The fact is, though I did not know it, my friends up in the daylight were pumping me down too much air (this in their eager desire to give enough), and I was in danger of becoming more buoyant than is good for a diver; in fact, if the clay-pipe gentleman had turned his wheel just a shade faster I should have traveled up in a rush--four hundred pounds and all. I learned afterward that Atkinson had an experience like this, one day, when a green tender mixed the signals and kept sending down more air every time he got a jerk for less. Atkinson was under a vessel's keel, patching a hole, and he hung on there as long as he could, saying things to himself, while the suit swelled and swelled.

Then he let go, and came to the surface so fast that he shot three feet out of the water, and startled the poor tender into dropping his line and taking to his heels.

Needless to say, that sort of thing is quite the reverse of amusing to a diver, who must be raised and lowered slowly (say at the speed of a lazy freight elevator) to escape bad head-pains from changing air-pressure.

I sat down on the deck and took note of things. The golden color of the water was due to the sunshine through it and the mud in it--a fine effect from a mean cause. For two or three feet I could see distinctly enough. I noticed how red my hands were from the squeeze of rubber wrist-bands. I felt the diving-suit over, and found the legs pressed hard against my body with the weight of water. I searched for the hammer and nail they had tied to me, and proceeded to drive the latter into the deck. I knew that divers use tools under water--the hammer, the saw, the crowbar, etc.--almost entirely by sense of feeling, and I wanted to see if I could do so. The thing proved easier than I had expected. I hit the nail on the head nearly every time. Nor did the water resistance matter much; my nail went home, and I was duly pleased. I breathed quicker, after this slight exertion, and recalled Atkinson's words about the great fatigue of work under water.

I stood up again and shuffled to the edge of the wreck. Strange to think that if I stepped off I should fall to the bottom (unless the life-line held me) just as surely as a man might fall to the ground from a housetop. I would not rise as a swimmer does. And then I felt the diver's utter helplessness: he cannot lift himself; he cannot speak; he cannot save himself, except as those lines save him. Let them part, let one of them choke, and he dies instantly.

And now the steady braying of the air-pump beat sounded like cries of distress, and the noise in my ears grew like the roar of a train. All divers below hear this roaring, and it keeps them from any talking one with another: when two are down together, they communicate by taps and jerks, as they do with the tenders above. I bent my head back, and could see a stream of bubbles, large ones, rising, rising from the escape-valve like a ladder of glistening pearls. And clinging to my little windows were myriad tiny bubbles that rose slowly. The old Hackensack was boiling all about me, and I saw how there may well be reason in the belief of some that this ceaseless ebullition from the helmet (often accompanied by a phosph.o.r.escent light in the bubbles) is the diver's safeguard against creatures of the deep.

Well, I had had my experience, and all had gone well--a delightful experience, a thing distinctly worth the doing. It was time to feel for the life-line and give the three slow pulls. Where was the ladder now? I was a little uncertain, and understood how easily a diver (even old-timers have this trouble) may lose his bearings. There! one, two, three. And the answer comes straightway down the line--one, two, three.

That means I must stand ready; they are about to lift me. Now the rope tightens under my arms, and easily, slowly, I rise, rise, and the golden water pales to silver, the bubbles boil faster, and I come to the surface by the ladder's side and grope again for its rungs. How heavy I have suddenly become without the river to buoy me! This climbing the ladder is the hardest task of all; it is like carrying two men on one's back. Again I bend over the deck, and see hands moving at my windows. A twist, a tug, and off comes the face-gla.s.s, with a suck of air. The test is over.

"You done well," is the greeting I receive; and the divers welcome me almost as one of their craft. Henceforth I have friends among these quiet men whose business it is to look danger in the eye (and look they do without flinching) as they fare over river and sea, and under river and sea, in search of wrecks.

THE BALLOONIST

I

HERE WE VISIT A BALLOON FARM AND TALK, WITH THE MAN WHO RUNS IT

I NEVER knew a man who has been so many things (and been them all fairly well) as has Carl Myers of Frankfort, New York. They call him "Professor" Myers ever since he took to ballooning, years ago; but they might call him Dr. Myers, for he has studied medicine, or Wrestler Myers, for he is skilled in all tricks of a.s.sault and defense, j.a.panese and others, or Banker Myers, for he spent years in financial dealings, or Printer Myers, for he still sets up his own type, or Telegrapher Myers, or Lecturer Myers, or Carpenter Myers, or Photographer Myers.

All these callings (and some others) Myers has pursued with eagerness and success, only making a change when driven to it by his thirst for varied knowledge and his guiding principle, "I refuse to let this world bore me." To-day the professor is sixty years old (a thin, wiry, sharp-eyed little man), yet I suspect some boys of sixteen who read these pages feel older than he does. You ought to hear him laugh! or tell about the air-ship that has carried him over thirteen States! or describe his "balloon farm" at Frankfort! I don't know when I have enjoyed myself more than during three days Professor Myers spent with me some time ago.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "BALLOON-CLOTH BY HUNDREDS OF YARDS."]

Suppose we begin with the balloon farm, which is certainly a queer place. It is a joke in the neighborhood that the professor plants his balloon crop in the spring, gathers it in the fall, and stores it away through the winter. Certain it is that in summer-time the visitor (and visitors come in swarms) sees fields marked off in rows with stakes and cross-poles, on which balloon-cloth by hundreds of yards seems to be growing (really, it is drying); and other fields, that look like an Eskimo village, with houses of crinkly yellowish stuff (really, half-inflated balloons); and groups of men boiling varnish in great kettles which are always getting on fire and may explode; and other men working nimbly at the knitting of nets; and others experimenting with parachutes; and the professor paddling away at the height of three thousand feet for his afternoon "skycycle" sail; and Mme. Carlotta, the celebrated aeronaut (also the professor's wife), making an ascension now and then from the front lawn in a chosen one of her twenty-odd balloons.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "FIELDS THAT LOOK LIKE AN ESKIMO VILLAGE."]

And in winter, should you explore the upper rooms of the house, you would find all the balloons tucked away snugly in coc.o.o.ns, as it were, fast asleep, ranged along the attic floor, each under its net, each ticketed with a record of its work, marked for good or bad conduct after it has been tested by master or mistress.

For weeks at a time in the experiment season a captive balloon hovers above the Frankfort farm, say twelve hundred feet up, and the tricks they play with that balloon would draw all the boys in the country, if their parents would let them go. Three guy-ropes hold the balloon steady like legs of an enormous tripod, and straight down from the netting a fourth rope hangs free. Now, imagine swinging on a rope twelve hundred feet long! They do that often for tests of flying-machines or aeroplanes--swing off the housetop, and sail away in a long, slow curve, just clearing the ground, and land on top of a windmill at the far side of the grounds. That's a swing worth talking about! And fancy a man hitched fast to this rope by shoulder-straps, and as he swings flapping a pair of great wings made of feathers and silk, and trying to steer with a ridiculous spreading tail of the same materials. The professor had a visit from such a man, who had spent years and a fortune in contriving this flying device, which, alas! would never fly.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "A PAIR OF GREAT WINGS MADE OF FEATHERS AND SILK--WHICH, ALAS! WOULD NEVER FLY."]

Professor Myers, like most aeronauts, insists that traveling by balloon, for one who understands it, is no more perilous, but rather less so, than ordinary travel by rail or trolley or motor carriage. He points out that for thirty-odd years he and his wife have led a most active aeronaut existence, have done all things that are done in balloons, besides some new ones, and got no harm from it--some substantial good rather, notably an aerial torpedo (operated by electricity from the ground), which flies swiftly in any desired direction, its silken fans and aluminum propeller under perfect control from a switchboard; also the "skycycle" balloon, which lifts the aeronaut in a suspended saddle and allows him, by the help of sail propeller and flapping aeroplanes (these driven by hands and feet), to make a gain on the wind, when going with it, of ten or twelve miles an hour. On this "skycycle" Professor Myers has paddled hundreds of miles, not trying to go against the wind, but selecting currents from the many available ones that favor his purpose. "What is the use," says he, "of fighting the wind when you can make the wind fight for you? People who take trains or boats wait for a certain hour or a certain tide, in the same way we wait for a certain wind current, and there is never long to wait, for the wind blows in totally different directions at different alt.i.tudes."

"Can you know with precision," I asked, "about these varying currents?"

"We can know a good deal by studying the clouds and by observations with kites and other instruments. And we would soon know much more if experimenters would work on these lines of conquering nature by yielding to her rather than opposing her."

In my talks with Professor Myers, of which there were many, we went first into the spectacular side of ballooning, the more obviously interesting part, stories of hair-breadth escapes and thrilling adventure, of the fair lady who a.s.sumed marriage vows sailing aloft over Herkimer County, of Carlotta's recent trip, ninety miles in sixty minutes with natural gas in the bag, of the English aeronaut who leaped from his car to death in the sea that a comrade might be saved through the lessened weight, of two lovesick Frenchmen who duelled with pistols from rival balloons, while all Paris gaped in wonder from the earth and shuddered when one silken bag, pierced by a well-aimed shot, dashed down to death with princ.i.p.al and second. And many more of that kind which, I must say, leave one far from convinced on the non-danger point.

Then the professor dwelt upon various odd things about balloons--this, for instance, that the rapid rise of an air-ship makes an aeronaut suffer the same pain and pressure on his ear-drums that a diver knows, only now the air presses from inside the head outward. And relief from this pain is found, as the diver finds it, by repeatedly opening the mouth and swallowing.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PROFESSOR MYERS IN HIS "SKYCYCLE."]

And he spoke of the strangest illusions of sight. The balloon is always standing still to the person in it, while the earth rushes madly along, forty, sixty, ninety miles an hour. As you shoot up the first half mile the ground beneath you seems to drop away into a deepening bowl, while the horizon sweeps up like a loosened spring. Then presently this illusion pa.s.ses, and you see everything flat. There are no hills any more, nor villages; no towers nor steep descents, only a level surface, marked charmingly in color, sometimes in wonderful mosaics, and strangely in light and shade. At the height of two miles nothing is familiar; you might as well be looking at the moon, for all you can recognize. Roads become yellowish lines; rivers brownish lines (and the water vanishes); a mountain-range becomes a shaded strip, with less shade on one edge (where the sun is) than on the other; a forest becomes a patch of color; a town another patch. There is scarcely any difference between water and land, and you see to the bottom of a lake, so that the configuration of its bed in valley and hill are apparent through the color and the shading. This singular disappearance of water bodies, for it amounts to almost that, has an evident importance.

"I'll tell you what we did on Lake Ontario," said the professor, "as a result of observations I made there from a balloon. In sailing over the lake on one occasion I remarked a number of small shaded spots which puzzled me. I could not imagine what they were. Finally, with the help of powerful field-gla.s.ses, I made them out to be wrecks sunk at various depths, and I realized that Lake Ontario, and indeed all the great lakes, abound in vessels which have gone down during centuries and never been recovered. No one can estimate the treasure which lies there waiting for some one to reclaim it. And I saw that it is a perfectly simple matter to locate these wrecks from a balloon, and to prove this I organized a modest wrecking expedition, and indicated to the diver where he was to go down. Down he went at that point, and found the wreck I had seen, and we pumped good coal out of her by hundreds of tons. What I did then on a small scale might be done on a large scale by any one willing to undertake it."

Of course I asked the professor why it is that an aeronaut can see down into a lake better than, say, an observer in a boat, and he explained that there is a great gain in intensity of terrestrial illumination when the viewpoint is at a height, because the sun's rays converge toward the earth, the sun being so many times larger, and therefore (this is his theory) a man lifted above the earth gets many more solar rays reflected to him from a given area than he would get if nearer to that area. In a word, it is a matter of optics and angles, but, the professor declares, most a.s.suredly a fact.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HOW THE EARTH LOOKS WHEN VIEWED FROM A HEIGHT OF ONE MILE.

(Photographed from a balloon.)]

Never before these talks did I realize how busy an aeronaut is, how much there is to do in a balloon. Besides attending to valve-cords and ballast there is the barometer to keep your eyes on, for by it alone can you know your alt.i.tude. Around moves the needle slowly as you rise, slowly as you fall, one point for a thousand feet. Rising or falling, you know the worst or the best there. Sometimes the needle sticks, the barometer will not work, and you must cast overside pieces of tissue-paper to see by their rise or fall if you are going up or down.

By your senses alone you cannot tell whether you are rising or falling, or your distance from the earth. That is most deceiving. Then you must have your watch ready to reckon your speed, so many thousand feet up or down in so many seconds, and your map spread out (nailed to a board, and that lashed fast), to tell where you are, and your compa.s.s out to fix the north and south points, for a balloon twists slowly all the time, twists one way going up and the other way coming down. n.o.body knows just why this is, unless it be the unequal drawing of the seams as the fabric swells and shrinks.

"I always keep the mouth of my balloon within easy reach," said the professor, "and play with it as an engineer does with his throttle-valve. Sometimes I even tie it shut when I am sailing, but that is dangerous."

"Why dangerous?"

"Because the balloon might ascend suddenly, and the expanding gas burst it."

"Can you see up into the balloon," I asked, "through the mouth?"

"Of course you can, and a beautiful sight it is. You look up through a round window, twenty inches or so in diameter, into the great bag, swelled out fifty or sixty feet in diameter, and perfectly tight, so that every line and veining of the net shows plainly through the silk in exquisite tracery, and wherever the sun strikes it you see a spread of gold and amber melting away in changing colors to the shaded parts. The balloon seems to be perfectly empty, perfectly still, yet it swings you upward and upward like a live thing. You get to feel that your balloon is alive."

"Does it make any noise?"

"Usually not. Now and then there is a creaking of the basket or a rustle of fabric, as you pa.s.s from one wind current to another, but as you drift along there is perfect stillness. I know nothing like the peace of a balloon sweeping in a storm. You feel like a disembodied spirit. You have no weight, no bonds; you fly faster than the swiftest express train. More than once Carlotta has raced a train going fifty miles an hour and beaten it."

"Is there danger to a balloon in a thunderstorm?"

"Apparently not, but it is terrifying to be in one. You seem to be at the very point where the lightning starts and the thunder-crash is born. All about you are roarings and blinding flashes, and it rains up on you and down on you, and in on you from all sides. While I never heard of a free balloon being struck by lightning, it is a common thing for operators on the ground even in fair weather to get shocks of atmospheric electricity down the anchor ropes of captive balloons."

Our talk drifted on, and the professor told of exciting times reporting the great yacht races from captive balloons (with reporters turning seasick in the plunging basket), and remarkable phenomena observed from balloons and double colored shadows of balloons (called parhelions) cast on clouds, and wonderful light effects, as when a marveling aeronaut looks down upon a sea of silver clouds bathed in sunshine and through black clefts sees a snowstorm raging underneath.

I was surprised to learn that at very great alt.i.tudes, say above three miles, the voice almost fails to serve, or, rather, the rarefied air loses in great part its power of voice transmission, so that in the vast silent s.p.a.ces of the sky one aeronaut must literally shout to another in the same basket to make himself heard. One would say that the great, calm heavens resent the chattering intrusion of noisy little men.