"Hans Phaall" - читать интересную книгу автора (Poe Edgar Allan)

ballast, and able to have carried up as many more.
Scarcely, however, had I attained the height of fifty yards, when,
roaring and rumbling up after me in the most horrible and tumultuous
manner, came so dense a hurricane of fire, and smoke, and sulphur, and
legs and arms, and gravel, and burning wood, and blazing metal, that
my very heart sunk within me, and I fell down in the bottom of the
car, trembling with unmitigated terror. Indeed, I now perceived that I
had entirely overdone the business, and that the main consequences
of the shock were yet to be experienced. Accordingly, in less than a
second, I felt all the blood in my body rushing to my temples, and
immediately thereupon, a concussion, which I shall never forget, burst
abruptly through the night and seemed to rip the very firmament
asunder. When I afterward had time for reflection, I did not fail to
attribute the extreme violence of the explosion, as regarded myself,
to its proper cause- my situation directly above it, and in the line
of its greatest power. But at the time, I thought only of preserving
my life. The balloon at first collapsed, then furiously expanded,
then whirled round and round with horrible velocity, and finally,
reeling and staggering like a drunken man, hurled me with great force
over the rim of the car, and left me dangling, at a terrific height,
with my head downward, and my face outwards, by a piece of slender
cord about three feet in length, which hung accidentally through a
crevice near the bottom of the wicker-work, and in which, as I fell,
my left foot became most providentially entangled. It is
impossible- utterly impossible- to form any adequate idea of the
horror of my situation. I gasped convulsively for breath- a shudder
resembling a fit of the ague agitated every nerve and muscle of my
frame- I felt my eyes starting from their sockets- a horrible nausea
overwhelmed me- and at length I fainted away.
How long I remained in this state it is impossible to say. It
must, however, have been no inconsiderable time, for when I
partially recovered the sense of existence, I found the day
breaking, the balloon at a prodigious height over a wilderness of
ocean, and not a trace of land to be discovered far and wide within
the limits of the vast horizon. My sensations, however, upon thus
recovering, were by no means so rife with agony as might have been
anticipated. Indeed, there was much of incipient madness in the calm
survey which I began to take of my situation. I drew up to my eyes
each of my hands, one after the other, and wondered what occurrence
could have given rise to the swelling of the veins, and the horrible
blackness of the fingemails. I afterward carefully examined my head,
shaking it repeatedly, and feeling it with minute attention, until I
succeeded in satisfying myself that it was not, as I had more than
half suspected, larger than my balloon. Then, in a knowing manner, I
felt in both my breeches pockets, and, missing therefrom a set of
tablets and a toothpick case, endeavored to account for their
disappearance, and not being able to do so, felt inexpressibly
chagrined. It now occurred to me that I suffered great uneasiness in
the joint of my left ankle, and a dim consciousness of my situation
began to glimmer through my mind. But, strange to say! I was neither