The basket was mid-waist deep, and just big enough to hold comfortably two men sitting on the strips of canvas which served as seats. Supplementing our jackets, two small life-preservers of the ordinary type were lashed to the inside of the basket. When I asked about parachutes, I was told that, while it was customary to carry them, on this occasion--as they were worse than useless to a man who had not practised with them--it was best not to bother myself with one. "Stick to the basket if anything happens," some one said; "it will float for a month, even if full of water." Some one else admonished not to blow up my jacket until we had stopped rising, lest it (from the expanding air, I suppose) should in turn blow me up. Then we were off. The last thing I noticed on the deck was the ship's cat, which I had observed a few moments previously rubbing his arched back ecstatically against a sagging "stabiliser," making a wild leap to catch one of the trailing guide-ropes. "He always does that," I heard my companion saying behind me. "Some day perhaps he will catch it, and then--if it happens at a time when there isn't an opportunity to wind in and let him down easy--I'm afraid there won't be a one of his nine lives left in the little furry pancake it will make of him when he hits the water. It's surprising how the water will flatten out a--anything striking it at the end of a thousand feet fall. Only the week before last----" To deflect the conversation to more cheering channels, I began to exclaim about the view. And what a view it was! The old _Xerxes_ was lying well down towards one end of the mighty bay, so that without turning the head one could sweep the eyes over the single greatest unit of far-reaching might in the whole world war, the Grand Fleet of the British Navy. And in no other way than in ascending in a balloon or a flying machine could one attain a vantage from which the whole of the fleet could be seen. Looking from the loftiest fore-top, from the highest hill of the islands, there was always a point in the distance beyond which there was simply an amorphous slaty blur of ships melting into the loom of the encircling land. But now those mysterious blurs were crystallising into definite lines of cleavage, and soon--save where some especially fantastic trick of camouflage made one ship look like two in collision, or played some other equally scurvy trick on the vision--I could pick out not only battleships, but cruisers, destroyers, submarines, ranged class by class and row on row. Even the method in the apparent madness with which the swarms of supply ships, colliers, oilers, trawlers, and drifters were scattered about was discernible.