The Man from the Clouds | Page 3

we were over land, but I managed to persuade
him to wait a little longer to make sure. He waited half an hour and
when he spoke then I could see that his mind was made up.
"We are falling pretty rapidly," said he, "and personally I'd sooner take
my chance in a parachute than stick in this basket till we bump. If one
is going to try a drop, the great thing is to see that it's a long drop.
Parachutes don't always open as quick as they're intended to. At any
moment we may begin to fall suddenly, so I'm going overboard now."
My own career has hitherto failed to convince my friends that prudence
is my besetting virtue, but whether it was the sobering effect of those
long hours of chilly thinking, or whether my good angel came to my
rescue, I know not; anyhow I shook my head as firmly as he nodded
his.
"We have only been going the minimum time you allowed for making
land," I argued, "and quite possibly the breeze may have dropped a bit.
Honestly I haven't heard a sound or smelt a smell that faintly suggested
land underneath, and we can still drop a lot more and have room to take
to the parachutes. Let's wait till we get down to one thousand feet."
"You do as you please," said he. "I'm going over."
"And I'm not going yet," said I.
We looked at one another in silence for a moment, and then he held out
his hand.
"Well, good-bye and good luck!" said he.
"Wait a little bit longer!" I implored him.

"My dear Merton," he said, "I feel it in my bones that we've been going
a lot faster than we calculated. In fact I know we have! One gets an
instinct for that sort of thing, and also one gets a sort of general idea
when to cut the basket and jump. I tell you we've been over land for the
last half hour. Come on, old chap, I honestly advise you to jump too."
I almost yielded, but some instinct seemed to hold me back. The
thought that he might think I was deserting him, the suspicion that he
suspected I was a little afraid of the drop, nearly drove me over the
edge of the basket with him. I felt a brute for hanging back, but in my
heart I felt just as certain he was jumping too soon as he felt that I was
waiting too long. So I shook his hand, and over he went; I had one
glimpse of something dark below me, and then the mist swallowed him
up. Rutherford was gone, and I may as well say now that not a sign of
him was ever seen again.
If you want to know what loneliness--real horrifying loneliness--is like,
I know no better recipe than drifting through a fog in a balloon, with
your only companion gone, and not the faintest belief in your heart that
you are within a hundred miles of any square inch of earth. I almost
think the fact that the balloon was steadily sinking and that sooner or
later I should have to leap from it too was the one thing that kept my
spirits anyways up to the mark. The prospect of even the most
desperate action was better than interminably facing that clammy void.
Though the chance of making land seemed to me infinitesimally remote
by this time, yet in case I had such almost inconceivable luck, it was
well to make some preparations for having a run for my money in an
enemy country. I took off my uniform coat, transferring everything I
wanted to keep from its pockets to those of my oilskin. I then put this
on and buttoned it up, and of course I took off my cap.
And then I smoked another pipe and watched the aneroid and tried not
to think at all, till with a start I realised we were considerably less than
a thousand feet above--the land or the sea? Heaven knew which, but we
were falling fast and there was no more time to lose. I hitched the
parachute on to my leg, got on the edge of the basket, and then--well, I
all but funked it. I remember my last thought was a horrible simile of a

man jumping off a tree with a rope round his neck, and then somehow
or other I forced myself to let go.
Concerning the next few seconds I can give no statistics, whether as to
height or pace. I only know that when I first became conscious of
anything, I was drifting like a snow flake down through the mist, and
that I could fill several pages with my