and perversely well-imagined account of a successful ascent to the moon – in a home-made balloon of ‘extraordinary dimensions’, containing forty thousand cubic feet of gas.21
Pfaall’s lengthy preparations are given in great detail, his equipment including a specialised telescope, barometer, thermometer, speaking trumpet, ‘etc etc etc’, but also a bell, a stick of sealing wax, tins of pemmican, ‘a pair of pigeons and a cat’. Immediately upon launching, an explosion leaves him hanging upside down from a rope beneath the balloon basket. This proves to be a typically Poe-like state of horrific suspension (‘I wondered … at the horrible blackness of my finger-nails’) which would often be repeated in later stories.
Ingeniously recovering himself by hooking his belt buckle to the rim of the basket, Hans describes how his balloon, ascending ‘with a velocity prodigiously accelerating’, rapidly overtakes the record height achieved by ‘Messieurs Gay-Lussac and Biot’. He soon crosses ‘the definite limit to the atmosphere’. On the way he has another Poe-like vision into the centre of a stormcloud: ‘My hair stood on end, while I gazed afar down within the yawning abysses, letting imagination descend and stalk about in the strange vaulted halls, and ruddy gulfs, and red ghastly chasms of hideous and unfathomable fire.’
Hans succeeds in breaking out of the earth’s gravitational field, and uses a patent ‘air-condenser’ to breathe. But his ears ache and his nose bleeds. During nineteen days and nights, he observes the steadily retreating surface of the planet, gradually reduced to a curving globe of gleaming blue oceans and white polar ice caps: ‘The view of the earth, at this period of my ascension, was beautiful indeed … a boundless sheet of unruffled ocean … the entire Atlantic coasts of France and Spain … of individual edifices not a trace could be discovered, the proudest cities of mankind had utterly faded away from the face of the earth …’
He eventually floats upwards into the moon’s gravitational sphere, and begins to drift into lunar orbit. At this point the balloon turns round and begins a rapid descent towards the lunar surface. After landing, the balloonist is surrounded by an aggressive mob of small, ugly-looking creatures, ‘grinning in a ludicrous manner, and eyeing me and my balloon askance, with their arms set akimbo’.
After desultory greetings and unsatisfactory conversations, Hans turns from them ‘in contempt’, and lifts his eyes longingly above the lunar horizon. The version of ‘earthrise’ which follows is one of the most hauntingly poetic passages in the entire story. ‘Gazing upwards at the earth so lately left, and left perhaps forever, [Hans] beheld it like a huge, dull, copper shield, about two degrees in diameter, fixed immovably in the heavens overhead, and tipped on one of its edges with a crescent border of the most brilliant gold.’
Poe’s final, delicate irony is that the moon creatures do not believe the earth is inhabited. They think Hans Pfaall is a great and inveterate liar. And when, after a five-year lunar sojourn, he somehow contrives to get a message taken back across space by ‘an inhabitant of the Moon’ to the earth, addressed to the ‘States’ College of Astronomers in the city of Rotterdam’, they in turn dismiss Hans as a ‘drunken villain’, and his missive as ‘a hoax’. Poe’s readers are sardonically asked to draw their own conclusions.
Within less than a decade, Poe would return to the subject of balloons and amazing flights. This first pioneering tale, written when he was only twenty-six, is evidently inspired by Cyrano de Bergerac’s Histoire comique. But its technical originality and brilliance, its mixture of scientific realism and metaphysical terrors, suggests the wholly new dimension of science fiction.22
5
Perhaps to counter just such metaphysical terrors, somewhere towards 1 a.m. Green allowed the balloon to sink until the long trail rope, though invisible, was again reassuringly in touch with the ground. They minimised the flame of their overhead safety lamp, and gradually ‘the intensity of the darkness yielded’ and they could pick out very faint shapes below – vast, shadowy stretches of forest looming out against snow, and the dull gleaming curve of an enormous river which they calculated must be the Rhine. These shapes were an extraordinary relief, familiar forms which, as Mason wrote, ‘acknowledged the laws of the material world’.23
Yet flying so close to the earth in what was evidently a landscape of steeply wooded valleys was a risk, and they had frequent moments of alarm. On one occasion around 3 a.m. a thin, luminous shape, like a watchtower or a spire, suddenly seemed to be approaching them at terrifying speed and at exactly their height. For several agonising moments all three leaned out of the basket, desperately trying to see what the obstacle was, and how they could possibly avoid it. Finally Green realised that it was a section of their own stay rope, hanging down from the crown of the balloon, not more than twenty-five feet outside the basket. But, caught by the reduced light from their low-burning lamp, it gave the alarming illusion of a distant object hovering directly in their path. Once again the night had deceived them.24
The night had also become increasingly cold, and their thermometer now dropped well below freezing. Even the coffee – deprived of its lime heater – was frozen solid in its canister. They held it just above the lamp to thaw it back into liquid form. The crew were tense, and morale was a little low. They drank brandy and talked of the great polar navigator Captain William Parry, and his heroic attempts to discover the North-West Passage through the frozen wastes of the Arctic Circle, and to reach the North Pole (as it turned out, a prophetic conversation).25
At 3.30 a.m. Green decided to climb back up to a safer height, and look for the first welcome indications of dawn. He discharged a little ballast, but to his surprise the balloon seemed to gather momentum as it climbed, and very shortly their barometer indicated a height of twelve thousand feet, far higher than he had intended, more than two miles up. Once again they were surrounded by total enveloping blackness and complete silence, except now there were a few scattered stars high above. As they were gazing up at these, something really terrifying happened. There was a sharp cracking sound from the balloon canopy overhead, a sudden jerk on the hoop, and then the whole basket began to drop away beneath their feet.26
Mason vividly described his sensations of horror. His narrative suddenly leaps into the present tense:
At this moment, while all around is impenetrable darkness and stillness most profound, an unusual explosion issues from the machine above, followed instantaneously by a violent rustling of the silk, and all the signs which may be supposed to accompany the bursting of a balloon … In an instant the car, as if suddenly detached from its hold, becomes subjected to a violent concussion, and appears at once to be in the act of sinking with all its contents into the dark abyss below. A second and a third explosion follow in quick succession … 27
Rigid with terror, clinging to the basket’s edge, Mason knew that nothing could now avert his death. Then, with equal suddenness, everything about the balloon reverted to normal. The basket became steady, the balloon canopy smooth and silent above them; all was just as tranquil and reassuring as before. Mason stood gazing blankly at Hollond, both men still clinging to the edge of the basket, pale with shock.
Green reassured his shaken passengers about what had happened. It was all quite normal, he told them with a smile, and could be explained by simple physics. While they had been flying near the ground and in increasingly cold air, the canopy of the balloon had gradually shrunk and folded in on itself, as its volume of hydrogen contracted. But as it was night, no one (except Green) had observed this. Then during their rapid ascent the balloon entered regions of lower pressure, and the hydrogen rapidly expanded again. This forced the canopy to reinflate more swiftly than usual. The loose folds of silk, concertina-ed or ‘corrugated’ together,
