“4 volts; much colder.” The air was becoming thinner, lighter. There was less oxygen to breathe, and he found himself sucking in the icy air in greedy gasps. Stooping, he twisted a valve that opened an oxygen tank. After that his breath came normally. An airman going rapidly aloft to great altitudes sometimes experiences an acute discomfort called, in aviation parlance, “bends,” or sometimes “rickets.” These “bends” may produce pains behind the flyer’s ears, like mastoiditis, or an apparent buzzing in the ears and head. If prolonged these pains become unbearable. Conway suffered from this trouble now, and slowed the progress of the balloon until his body could become accustomed to the change in pressure of the air. At sixteen thousand feet the _Marie_ entered the first layer of clouds. The mist hugged tight around the basket; whereas before--when in clear air--Conway had been able to see a distance of fifty miles, he could scarcely see ten feet now. The feeling of isolation and aloneness was even more pronounced. The temperature was fifteen degrees below, yet snow filtered down from the clouds above, passed Conway slowly, Gradually the rounded top of the huge bag was covered with snow, a perceptible weight to carry into the rarefied air as the flight progressed. Conway spilled more sand from his ballast bags, a thin yellow stream of grains that fell away like beads of amber glass. At twenty thousand feet the _Marie_ lifted herself out of the clouds and into clear sunshine. The sky here was a deep and lifeless blue. Clouds stretched out in all directions--seemingly into infinity, low ridge after low ridge, with valleys in between: a flat plain of brilliantly white mist that was painful to the eye. Above these clouds there was no haze; the sun was intense, yet cold, unfriendly. It was ten minutes until three o’clock. The radio was still bringing in music from an invisible, distant world. The bends grew less painful as the minutes passed. But Conway’s body was gradually growing numb from the lack of pressure on it--a normal phenomenon at extremely high altitudes. Some men may go to forty thousand feet before this sets in; others feel it coming on at thirty thousand. Conway began to suffer from it at thirty-five. He felt no cold, no pain; his body seemed to rest comfortably, with a kind of sensuous inertia that lulled him toward a seductive semiconsciousness. He tried to fight this feeling, tried to rouse himself. He knew its symptoms and its dangers: in its final form a few minutes of complete paralysis, then sleep. The oxygen would feed his lungs until it became exhausted, then sleep would carry him to death in the thin, anaemic air eight miles above the earth. He had felt that way on other flights, although less so than now. And he still had nine thousand feet to go before the record would be safely his.... The mercury in the thermometer had tumbled down to twenty-nine below. * * * * *