Also I remember his saying, with a tinge of polite regret in his tone, that he was sorry I had not put on a uniform overcoat with shoulder straps on it, before boarding the car; because, as he took pains to explain, in the event of our cable parting and of our drifting over the Allies’ lines and then descending, he might possibly escape, but I should most likely be shot on the spot as a spy before I had a chance to explain.  “However,” he added consolingly, “those are possibilities most remote.  The rope is not likely to break; and if it did we both should probably be dead before we ever reached the earth.”

That last statement sank deep into my consciousness; but I fear I did not hearken so attentively as I ought to the continuation of the lieutenant’s conversation, because, right in the middle of his remarks, something had begun to happen.

An officer had stepped up alongside to tell me that very shortly I should undoubtedly be quite seasick—­or, rather, skysick—­because of the pitching about of the basket when the balloon reached the end of the cable; and I was trying to listen to him with one ear and to my prospective traveling companion with the other when I suddenly realized that the officer’s face was no longer on a level with mine.  It was several feet below mine.  No; it was not—­it was several yards below mine.  Now he was looking up toward us, shouting out his words, with his hands funneled about his mouth for a speaking trumpet.  And at every word he uttered he shrank into himself, growing shorter and shorter.

It was not that we seemed to be moving.  We seemed to be standing perfectly still, without any motion of any sort except a tiny teetering motion of the hamper-basket, while the earth and what was on it fell rapidly away from beneath us.  At once all sense of perspective became distorted.

When on the roof of a tall building this distortion had never seemed to me so great.  I imagine this is because the building remains stationary and a balloon moves.  Almost directly below us was one of our party, wearing a soft hat with a flattish brim.  It appeared to me that almost instantly his shoulders and body and legs vanished.  Nothing remained of him but his hat, which looked exactly like a thumb tack driven into a slightly tilted drawing board, the tilted drawing board being the field.  The field seemed sloped now, instead of flat.

Across the sunken road was another field.  Its owner, I presume, had started to turn it up for fall planting, when the armies came along and chased him away; so there remained a wide plowed strip, and on each side of it a narrower strip of unplowed earth.  Even as I peered downward at it, this field was transformed into a width of brown corduroy trimmed with green velvet.

For a rudder we carried a long, flapping clothesline arrangement, like the tail of a kite, to the lower end of which were threaded seven yellow-silk devices suggesting inverted sunshades without handles.  These things must have been spaced on the tail at equal distances apart, but as they rose from the earth and followed after us, whipping in the wind, the uppermost one became a big umbrella turned inside out; the second was half of a pumpkin; the third was a yellow soup plate; the fourth was a poppy bloom; and the remaining three were just amber beads of diminishing sizes.