Robur the Conqueror

Atlantic liner could have offered them more comfort. If they did not sleep soundly it was that they did not wish to do so, or rather that their very real anxiety prevented t

t displease him; he liked to rub shoulders with the great in this world. But if he finally went to sleep i

e was not a sound, except now and then the whistle from some terrestrial locomotive, or the calling of some animal. Strange instinct! These terrestrial beings felt the aeronef gl

lision with another such machine? Certainly not. Robur had not yet found imitators. The chance of encountering an aerostat gliding through the air was too remote

e to be avoided as a ship avoids the reefs of the sea. The engineer, it is true, had given the course, and in doing so had taken into account the altitude necessary to clear the summits of the h

ched. They concluded, therefore, that during the night the whole length of Lake Erie had been traversed, and that, as they were going due wes

Queen of the West, the vast reservoir into which flow the products of Indiana, Ohi

gs. His colleague pointed out to him the churches and public edifices, the numerous "elevators" or mechanical, g

ious that we are going farther west than is convenie

as traveling in a straight line

That morning the engineer did not leave his cabin. Either he was occupied in some work

egree centigrade for every seventy meters of elevation the temperature was not insupportable. And so, in chatting and thinking and waiting for the enginee

sed the Father of Waters, the Mississippi, whose double-decked steam-boats seemed no bigger than canoes.

the course of the aeronef. Soon the bluffs gave place to the large plains of western Iowa and Nebraska-immense prairies extending all the way to the foot of the Rocky Mountains

d see nothing. And they were not attacked by vertigo, as might have been expected. There was no guiding mark, and there was nothing to cause the vertigo, as there would have been on the top of a lofty building. T

they could see the yellow waters of the Missouri, then the town, with its houses of wood and brick in the center of a rich basin, like a buckle in the iron belt which clasps North America round the waist. Doubtless, also, as the passengers in the aeron

e fact. It would be the explanation of the astonishing phenomen

r, whose valley is followed by the Pacific Railway in its route acros

is absurd project of tak

ike it or not!" e

re! I am not the man to s

l Evans. "But be calm,

ca

temper until

in their fall. At a distance these blocks take the most fantastic shapes. Here and there amid this enormous game of knucklebones there could be traced the imaginary ruins of medieval cities with forts and dungeons, pepper-box turrets, and machico

crossed, and the plain extended to the extreme limits of the ho

llowing occasionally reached the aeronef from the herds of buffalo that roamed over the prairie in search of water and pasturage. And when they ceased, the tr

a fox, a wild cat, or a coyote, the "Canis latra

nd absinthe, mingled with the more powerful fragrance of

he coyote. It was the shout of a Redskin, which no T