Whence, it may be asked, had come that plaything of the tempest?  From what part of the world did it rise?  It surely could not have started during the storm.  But the storm had raged five days already, and the first symptoms were manifested on the 18th.  It cannot be doubted that the balloon came from a great distance, for it could not have traveled less than two thousand miles in twenty-four hours.

At any rate the passengers, destitute of all marks for their guidance, could not have possessed the means of reckoning the route traversed since their departure.  It was a remarkable fact that, although in the very midst of the furious tempest, they did not suffer from it.  They were thrown about and whirled round and round without feeling the rotation in the slightest degree, or being sensible that they were removed from a horizontal position.

Their eyes could not pierce through the thick mist which had gathered beneath the car.  Dark vapor was all around them.  Such was the density of the atmosphere that they could not be certain whether it was day or night.  No reflection of light, no sound from inhabited land, no roaring of the ocean could have reached them, through the obscurity, while suspended in those elevated zones.  Their rapid descent alone had informed them of the dangers which they ran from the waves.  However, the balloon, lightened of heavy articles, such as ammunition, arms, and provisions, had risen into the higher layers of the atmosphere, to a height of 4,500 feet.  The voyagers, after having discovered that the sea extended beneath them, and thinking the dangers above less dreadful than those below, did not hesitate to throw overboard even their most useful articles, while they endeavored to lose no more of that fluid, the life of their enterprise, which sustained them above the abyss.

The night passed in the midst of alarms which would have been death to less energetic souls.  Again the day appeared and with it the tempest began to moderate.  From the beginning of that day, the 24th of March, it showed symptoms of abating.  At dawn, some of the lighter clouds had risen into the more lofty regions of the air.  In a few hours the wind had changed from a hurricane to a fresh breeze, that is to say, the rate of the transit of the atmospheric layers was diminished by half.  It was still what sailors call “a close-reefed topsail breeze,” but the commotion in the elements had none the less considerably diminished.

Towards eleven o’clock, the lower region of the air was sensibly clearer.  The atmosphere threw off that chilly dampness which is felt after the passage of a great meteor.  The storm did not seem to have gone farther to the west.  It appeared to have exhausted itself.  Could it have passed away in electric sheets, as is sometimes the case with regard to the typhoons of the Indian Ocean?