Authors: Willard Price
‘A little more of that and we wouldn’t have had any basket,’ he said, as they pulled in the trail line. ‘What’s the chance of finding a better landing field?’
‘Mighty poor. These sisal plantations extend for many miles. Then the country changes - for the worse.’
Dawn was beginning to colour the sky. Kilimanjaro was silhouetted like a giant against the morning light. Ahead, beyond the sisal fields, rose another high hurdle, Mount Meru, fifteen thousand feet.
‘Not again!’ exclaimed Roger with sinking heart. ‘I’ve had enough mountain-hopping. Is this what you meant by worse ahead?’
‘No. I don’t think we’ll have to top this one. The wind is going to carry us past it. It’s after that that the real fun begins.’
They slid by Meru with only a few hundred feet to spare. On the left some miles away lay the town of Arusha. Hal got it in his binoculars. He hoped someone might see the fugitive balloon and report its position.
But, so early in the morning, there was not a sign of life in the streets.
Hal was disappointed, for he knew there would not be another town for hundreds of miles.
Now the country became worse, as Hal had promised. It was beautiful, but it offered no landing space for a balloon swept along by a strong wind. Abrupt hills and sudden valleys and forests of great trees left only an occasional small level patch where it would be certain death to come down, because before the racing balloon could be stopped it would crash into the trees or rocks on the far side of the clearing.
The only safe place was in the sky - and even there they were not too safe with a torn basket and a gusty wind so powerful that it might tear the bag away from the basket at any moment.
Suddenly what looked like America’s Grand Canyon opened out beneath. It was about as wide, but not so deep.
The Great Rift,’ Hal said. ‘Believed to be the longest canyon in the world. It stretches all the way from the Zambesi River up through Central Africa and North Africa, on up the Red Sea and ends at the Dead Sea - a total length equal to one quarter of the earth’s circumference.’
‘What made it?’
‘Volcanic fires beneath. Most of Africa’s volcanoes rise from its sides. Earthquakes keep shaking it. It has a devilish way of shaking cities to bits or sending them up in flames. You remember the Bible story of Sodom and Gomorrah - two cities at the south end of the Dead Sea that were destroyed by earthquake and fire, and people who escaped were told not to look back or they would be turned into pillars of salt. That story may be based on the fact that there really are pillars of salt in that region - and the whole gorge is pretty salty. Of course the Dead Sea is so salty you can’t sink in it. And there’s a row of salt lakes all along the bottom of the canyon through this part of Africa. There’s one ahead right now - Lake Manyara.’
It filled the canyon from cliff to cliff and was so long that the end of it was out of sight. But it wasn’t white like salt - it was as pink as a sunset.
‘Whoever heard of pink salt?’ Roger said, doubting for a moment that his brother knew what he was talking about.
Then something happened that was so weird he could not believe it though he saw it with his own eyes. The whole pink top of the lake rose into the sky and the balloon passed under it.
‘What is it - a mirage? I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.’
‘It’s not a mirage,’ Hal said. ‘It’s real. Pink flamingoes. Millions upon millions of them live on this lake. When they’re alarmed, as they are now by this balloon, they all sail up into the sky in a pink cloud. Except those that can’t fly.’
‘Why can’t they all fly?’
‘The soda in the lake hardens on their legs. The big birds can fly in spite of that, but the young ones aren’t strong enough. Many of them get so loaded down with the stuff that they can’t even swim or walk, much less fly, and they die by the thousands. Game wardens who hate to see beautiful animals die bring in boys and girls from the schools and these young Africans wade into the shallows and break up the big white balls with hammers, taking care of course not to break the leg inside. In that way great numbers of the little birds are saved, but still thousands must die for there just aren’t enough kids available to do the whole job.’
‘Look at the pink elephants!’ exclaimed Roger. ‘I thought you had to be drunk to see a pink elephant. And all those other animals near the lake - they’re all pink. Or have I got the pink eye?’
It was an amazing sight. The zebras were pink, the giraffes were pink, the rhinos, buffaloes, wildebeest, waterbucks, hippos, hyenas, all pink. Six pink lions emerged from the woods to look up at the balloon. It was a pink world.
Roger looked with astonishment at his pink brother. Hal laughed, and pointed upwards. The sun shone through and between thousands upon thousands of pink wings. The result was that the sun itself could scarcely be seen, but only the glowing pink cloud and a landscape beneath so rosy that you might think you were wearing pink glasses.
The balloon had now left the lake and was travelling over the valley floor. This was the famous Manyara game reserve, protected by towering cliffs, full of tropical vegetation, a paradise for wildlife.
The scene changed suddenly. Now that the balloon had passed, the cloud of flamingoes settled down once more to the lake and the rocks that had been so warm and pink turned cold and grey. A blast of thunder came from the eastern sky. The boys looked back. A thundercloud as black as night was climbing above the horizon. White daggers of lightning stabbed through it.
As if to answer the thunder, the Great Rift talked back with an earth-shaking roar, and landslides of great rocks dislodged from the cliffs by an earthquake crashed down into the valley.
At the same time the god of the winds puffed out his cheeks and turned what had been a steady though strong wind into a violent, gusty gale that tossed the basket into
the air and let it down with such a jolt as to break two of the eight lines attaching the basket to the ring.
‘Look what’s coming,’ Roger exclaimed. The western wall of the canyon was rushing towards them. Or so it seemed until you looked down and saw the woodland tearing by underneath.
Roger picked up the trail rope, intending to throw it out and let it drag on the ground to slow down the mad rush of the Jules Verne.
‘Don’t,’ Hal warned. ‘We can’t go low enough to trail a rope. We’ve got to rise and go over that.’
He nodded at the cliff ahead. The western wall of the canyon rose black and menacing before them. ‘We ought to climb to three thousand feet. Don’t know whether we can do it or not. Let’s chuck out some sand.’
They began to throw out the bags. The supply of sand was getting dangerously low. Hal worried - but Roger hoped that the same thing that had happened at Kilimanjaro would happen again here. An up-current would carry them over the top. ‘We’ll get into the elevator pretty soon,’ he hoped.
Hal was doubtful. ‘This isn’t that kind of a wind -strong and steady. It’s all snorts and sneezes. Hate to worry you, but I’m afraid we have a real cyclone building up. Cyclones have no respect for honest balloonists.’
Roger displayed his knowledge of cyclones. ‘A cyclone has a steady wind. It goes round and round in a big circle.’
‘Which way?’ said Hal.
‘Clockwise south of the equator. Anti-clockwise north of the equator.’
‘And where are we now?’
‘Gee, I hadn’t thought of that. We’re on the equator.’
‘So,’ Hal said, ‘the wind doesn’t know which way to go. It just goes mad. It blasts off in all directions. That’s why cyclones are so much worse in the tropics than anywhere else. Keep throwing out sand.’
‘All of it?’
‘Every last bag. It’s our only chance.’
Out it all went. Hal hated to see it go, for it meant that from now on they had no means of raising the balloon. They could bring it down by letting out gas. But they could not make it go up. It was at the mercy of wind and sun. Wind might toss it up, sun heating the bag and expanding the hydrogen might carry it up, but any human power to lift it was gone.
They had no time to dwell on these unhappy thoughts, for suddenly a sneeze of the wind god turned the basket completely upside down and the two balloonauts would have fallen to their death if they had not clung to the rim of the basket. As it was, they dangled dangerously over the savage rocks at the foot of the cliff, a thousand feet below.
A wrench of wind reversed the basket and they climbed back in. Their faces were pale with shock.
Neither said a word. There were no words strong enough.
The sandbags had done their best and the balloon was rising. But the chance of clearing the top was very slim. There was a moment of hope when the wind turned to bite itself and carried them away from the cliff instead of towards it. The hope died when a whipping blast hurled the basket into the cliff with a crunching, crippling sound that made them fear there would be nothing of their magic carpet left.
For a few breathless moments they stuck there as if plastered to the precipice.
‘We could let out some hydrogen and go down,’ Roger suggested.
‘And be ground up on those rocks? Besides, we have to think of the balloon”. It doesn’t belong to us. If there’s a chance to save it, we’ve got to do it.’
The wind that had glued the Jules Verne to the cliff like a fly to flypaper now had a new and more devilish idea. It gusted in from the side and sent the balloon rolling like a ball along the face of the precipice.
The basket whirled round and round, crashing at every turn into daggers of rock projecting from the cliff. The basket was being mashed into a mush of broken and tangled strands. The points of rock reached out to stab the passengers who hopped continually from one side of the basket to the other in an effort to avoid them. Two more of the ropes suspending the basket were sawed through by rocky knives. Now only four ropes held the basket to the ring above and the extra strain on them might snap them at any moment.
Hal seized some extra rope and tried to repair the broken lines, but the whirling, bumping and bruising made the work almost impossible.
‘We’re in luck,’ Hal gasped.
‘What’s lucky about this?’ ,
Hal looked up at the bag rolling along the jagged cliff. ‘Wonderful that it hasn’t been ripped open. That really would finish us off.’
Roger, dizzy and sick from the whirling and bumping, tried to be grateful. He looked down a thousand feet to the rocks. Yes, it was better to be here than there.
The whirling stopped. A back eddy of wind carried the balloon fifty feet out from the cliff. Then it was thrown in again at such speed that collision with the cliff would surely break the bag or the remaining basket ropes.
It did not quite reach the cliff. A sudden up-blast carried it aloft, up and over the edge of the precipice, out of the diabolical Great Rift, and away at breakneck speed towards the west.
The black cloud had spread to swallow the whole sky. How different from the rosy world of half an hour ago.
Lightning no longer flashed on the eastern horizon. It forked down from the churning clouds directly overhead. Every flash was followed in a split second by a deafening roar.
‘Too close for comfort,’ Hal said.
Roger guessed his meaning. ‘The gas.’
‘Right. Hydrogen isn’t merely inflammable - it’s explosive. Just let one little jag of lightning burn a hole in that bag and there’d be nothing left of either the balloon or us.’
‘It wouldn’t really act as fast as all that, would it?’
‘Well, make a guess,’ suggested Hal. ‘What do you suppose is the temperature of burning hydrogen?’
‘How do I know? Perhaps boiling point; two hundred and twelve, Fahrenheit.’
‘Multiply that by twenty-five and you’ve got iC Hydrogen burns at more than five thousand degrees. One of the hottest flames known. You’ve seen men welding steel with a blowpipe or blowtorch. Chances are the gas was hydrogen. As soon as it gets out and combines with the oxygen in the air, it explodes. It makes a flame so hot it can cut metal as easily as a knife cuts cheese.’
‘Flash, crash!’ said the rolling black over their heads. Instinctively they hunched their shoulders as if to protect themselves from the descending danger.
‘If hydrogen is so awful,’ Roger said, ‘why do they use it in balloons?’
‘Because it’s the lightest of all elements. It lifts the balloon as nothing else could. Next best is helium - but it’s heavier and besides you’d have a lot of trouble finding it in Africa.’
The sky was now so dark that the sudden bursts of light hurt the eyes. Roger couldn’t help ducking at every new explosion.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I can think of better things to do than to take a trip through a thunderstorm tied to a bomb.’
Hal laughed. ‘Well, since we can’t do anything about it, let’s forget it. Help me fix these ropes.’
‘We have no more line.’
‘Then we’ll have to cut some pieces from the trail rope.’
He took up the end of the rope. He examined it with interest. ‘I remember how this looked when we first got the balloon. The end was frayed out, unravelled. Now look at it.’
The rope ended sharp and clean, not with any ragged tail.
‘Know what that means? That rope didn’t just come loose from the log. It was cut with a sharp knife.’
Roger stared at the rope. ‘Who could have hated us that much?’
‘That’s easy,’ Hal said. ‘I can think of three possibilities. King Ku would plainly like to see us snuffed out, and all other white men at the same time - why, remains a mystery. Dugan wants our job and seems willing to stop at nothing to get it. And Basa - I thought we had made him our friend - but perhaps he’s still sore.’
It was an unhappy feeling - three deadly enemies on the ground.
But presently there was a fourth. Rain. Not a gentle little shower, but a torrent as if someone above had opened a fire hydrant. It came down from arctic heights. It was bitterly cold, and all the colder because of the cyclonic wind that whipped the boys’ wet bodies.