The excessive swiftness with which the balloon had passed prevented us from understanding what they said. The sound of their voices only reached us as the distant echo of human speech. Our ears only heard inarticulate sounds whose meaning escaped us, so swiftly was the distance increased which separated our question from their answer. At another time the car floated majestically over an immense plain which filled the horizon and stretched as far as the eye could see. Then it was I wanted to effect our descent. I said so to our aeronaut, and asked him to open the valve and let the gas escape slowly, so as to allow our balloon to sink gently to the ground. The plain which was unfolded before our eyes seemed to me created expressly for a successful landing. Here we could descend without fearing any of those terrible accidents which threatened every descent on less propitious ground. For a balloon does not always stop when it reaches the earth; it often drags its car and knocks it with terrible rage against obstacles, as we ourselves were destined to see. Nothing of the kind was to be feared here. The balloon might graze the earth and drag the car along the ground as much as it liked without any great danger to ourselves. It was bound to end at any moment by literally expiring, without crushing its passengers in its agony. But it was fated that we were to continue our journey and descend later on in a less peaceable manner. The sailor certainly made an excellent soldier, as did all the brave seamen who had pluckily done their duty in the Siege of Paris; but as an aeronaut he was mediocre. He took no account of anything, neither the direction we had followed, nor the swift speed of our passage, nor the distance we must have traversed since our start from Paris. He said: “If you give orders to come down, I will open the valve. I will do so to obey orders, but may I take the liberty of saying that we have not yet gone very far. We shall fall into the enemy’s lines, and once the valve is open we shall not be able to go up again.” I was not of this opinion; I considered that we must be very far from Paris and that this plain must be one of the fertile plains of Normandy, which extend from the banks of the Seine to the sea. We had been travelling for more than two hours with a powerful east wind and had moved with almost painful speed the whole time. Unless one supposed that the balloon had changed its direction on the way, which was by no means probable as the wind had not changed at all, it was easy to estimate the distance which we must have traversed. It was sufficient to watch the shadow of the balloon gliding at express speed over the distant earth. If the course of this immense phantom appeared very rapid to us at a height of one thousand or one thousand five hundred yards, what must have been the real speed of the balloon itself, which projected such a rapid shadow into the distance!