Chapter 9
Viewing A Battle from a Balloon
She was anchored to earth in a good-sized field. Woods horizoned the
field on three of its edges and a sunken road bounded it on the fourth.
She measured, I should say at an offhand guess, seventy-five feet from
tip to tip lengthwise, and she was perhaps twenty feet in diameter
through her middle. She was a bright yellow in color--a varnished,
oily-looking yellow--and in shape suggestive of a frankfurter.
At the end of her near the ground and on the side that was underneath
--for she swung, you understand, at an angle--a swollen protuberance
showed, as though an air bubble had got under the skin of the sausage
during the packing and made a big blister. She drooped weakly
amidships, bending and swaying this way and that; and, as we came under
her and looked up, we saw that the skin of the belly kept shrinking in
and wrinkling up, in the unmistakable pangs of acute cramp colic.
She had a sickly, depleted aspect elsewhere, and altogether was most
flabby and unreliable looking; yet this, as I learned subsequently, was
her normal appearance.
Pages:
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273