towns, now lit by gaslight, glowed on the horizon like unearthly sources of energy and activity. Their reflected radiance bloomed yellow and purple in the thickened atmosphere above the balloon: a first indication of urban pollution.
By midnight they had been airborne for nearly twelve hours, already something of a record. They were now flying towards the flaring lights of some huge industrial complex, distinctly set on the banks of a large river running north and south. They identified this as the river Meuse, and realised that they must have long since passed south of Brussels. The town was too big to be either Charleroi or Maastricht, and the only possibility remained Liège. They were astonished that such an ancient city should be surrounded by so much modern industry. Approached by air, and at night, this became dramatically evident.
Nestling in the valley of the river Meuse, with its historic churches and ancient markets, Liège was once the tranquil centre of the traditional textile trade of northern France. But as part of the newly independent Belgium it been transformed into one of the largest centres of heavy industry in the coalmining belt of northern Europe. With a population of nearly a hundred thousand labourers, it supported a growing number of huge ironworks and foundries, which were worked in shifts without ceasing twenty-four hours a day. Its commercial port was the third largest river port in Europe, with direct river and canal connections to Antwerp, Rotterdam and Aachen. Massive supplies of coal, iron ore and other raw materials were constantly shipped in by barge, while a steady stream of metal goods, guns and engineering parts were hurried away south-eastwards into France and south-westwards into Germany.
The balloonists, silently approaching through the night and flying very low, were transfixed by the unearthly glare of the fiery foundries moving swiftly towards them out of the darkness. The ancient centre of the city itself, set peacefully round the great oxbow curve of the Meuse, ‘the theatres and squares, the markets and public buildings’, slid quietly beneath them. But the surrounding districts ‘appeared to blaze with innumerable fires … to the full extent of all our visible horizon’.14
As they floated over this industrial inferno, they were gradually overwhelmed by the thunderous machine noise, the choking industrial smells, and the haunting sound of men below still working on the night shifts. There was disembodied shouting, coughing, swearing, metallic banging and sometimes, weirdly, sharp echoing bursts of laughter. They were being granted a unique, nightmare vision of the new industrial future, a world of ever-extending ironworks where every street was ‘marked out by its particular line of fires’. It was what Mason called the strangest glimpse of a ‘Cyclopean region’.
Mason’s disturbing account of passing over Liège later became famous in aeronautical circles. The French aeronaut Camille Flammarion recalled it as he made the same night flight over the symbolic city thirty years later. But for Flammarion, the experience was subtly different. He pointed enthusiastically to the industrial lights as they approached: ‘See, mon ami! See how beautiful this is! Do not dream of days gone by …’ The vision of manmade power and productivity deeply impressed him: ‘The Belgian towns, lit up by gaslight and the flames issuing from the smoky summits of the blast furnaces seemed to us silent aerial navigators the most dazzling spectacle. The deep sound of the Meuse, as it flowed along its course, was orchestrated by the sharper noises from the workshops, whose mysterious flames and dark smoke rose in the distance all around us.’15
But the English balloonists were shaken. Uncharacteristically distracted, Green mistakenly let their expensive coffee-brewing device fall overboard. Mason recorded this unusual error dispassionately. Having opened it over the side of the basket to shake out the expended materials, ‘Mr Green unfortunately let it slip from his hand’.16 Even less in character, Green then started to play a curious trick on the unsuspecting foundry workers below.
He lit a blazing white Bengal light, and lowered it on a rope until it was skimming ‘nearly over their heads’. He then urged Mason to shout down through the speaking trumpet ‘alternately in French and German’, as if some supernatural power was visiting them from on high. The ironworkers were being visited by the gods of the air.
Mason complacently imagined how this aeronautical trick must have ‘struck terror’ into even the boldest hearts and wisest heads of the ‘honest artizans’ beneath: ‘Catching alone the rays of the light that preceded from the artificial fire-work that was suspended close beneath us, the balloon, the only part of the machine visible to them, presented the aspect of a huge ball of fire, slowly and steadily traversing the sky, at such a distance as to preclude the possibility of it being mistaken for any of the ordinary productions of Nature …’17
As the Bengal light went out, they completed this supernatural effect by emptying half a bag of ballast sand directly onto the upturned faces a hundred feet below. Then the balloon sailed silently and invisibly away, leaving behind the puzzled tribe of Belgian foundry workers staring uncomprehendingly upwards, as these mysterious superior intelligences disappeared. ‘Lost in astonishment, and drawn together by their mutual fears,’ Mason concluded, ‘they stood no doubt looking up at the object of their terrors.’18 So the gods were also treating the ironworkers as if they were some primitive tribe.
Mason’s account of the voyage, Aeronautica, has several illustrations, views and cloudscapes, among them a very strange, dramatic one entitled ‘Balloon over Liège at Night’, taken from an imaginary point outside the basket looking across at the crew. Their faces are weirdly illuminated by the Davy lamp hung from the balloon hoop. The curving river Meuse, and the blazing foundries, are visible in the darkness below.
After midnight it was the crew’s own turn to be alarmed. Gradually all human lights on the ground disappeared. The moonless night seemed to close in around them, encircling them completely, even from below. It was an increasingly disturbing sensation. ‘The sky seemed almost black with the intensity of night … the stars shone like sparks of the whitest silver scattered upon the jetty dome around us. Occasionally faint flashes of lightning would for an instant illuminate the horizon … Not a single object of terrestrial nature could anywhere be distinguished; an unfathomable abyss of “darkness visible” seemed to encompass us on every side.’19
What was so frightening and disorientating was that the darkness seemed increasingly solid. Gone was the classic balloon feel of airy vistas, glowing luminosity and huge benign openness. The night was thickening into an alien substance. It was menacing and claustrophobic, entrapping and imprisoning them. Mason records no conversation with Green or Hollond at this time, but afterwards tried to describe what were clearly shared sensations: ‘A black, plunging chasm was around us on all sides, and as we tried to penetrate this mysterious gulf, we could not prevent the idea coming into our heads that we were cutting a path through an immense block of black marble by which we were enveloped, and which, a solid mass a few inches away from us seemed to melt as we drew near, so that it might allow us to penetrate even further into its cold and dark embrace.’20
The idea of the men being thrust into or entombed in ‘an immense block of black marble’, and held there forever in its ‘cold and dark embrace’, is strangely unsettling. Is it a shivering anticipation of the Victorian horror of being buried alive; or even of some nightmare of sexual entrapment? The passage is curiously reminiscent of some of the later horror stories of Edgar Allan Poe, such as ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. In fact it is highly likely that Poe read this very description as soon as it was published, for it turns out that he was following the accounts of Green’s balloon adventures very closely from the other side of the Atlantic.
4
The year before Green’s epic flight, Edgar Allan Poe had written one of the earliest of his fantasy stories, ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of
