The whole aspect of this monster was formidable and threatening, and it kept changing its color from a very light mauve to a dark, angry purple so thick that it cast a shadow as it drifted between my monoplane and the sun.
On the upper curve of its huge body there were three great projections which I can only describe as enormous bubbles, and I was convinced as I looked at them that they were charged with some extremely light gas which served to buoy up the misshapen and semi-solid mass in the rarefied air. The creature moved swiftly along, keeping pace readily with the monoplane, and for twenty miles or more it formed my horrible escort, hovering over me like a bird of prey which is waiting to pounce. Its method, its progression—done so swiftly that it was not easy to follow—was to throw out a long, glutinous streamer in front of it, which in turn seemed to draw forward the rest of the writhing body. So elastic and gelatinous was it that never for two successive minutes was it the same shape, and yet each change made it more threatening and loathsome than the last.
I knew that it meant mischief. Every purplish flush of its hideous body told me so. The vague, goggling eyes which were turned always upon me were cold and merciless in their viscid hatred. I dipped the nose of my monoplane downwards to escape it. As I did so, as quick as a flash, there shot out a long tentacle from this mass of floating blubber, and it fell as light and sinuous as a whip-lash across the front of my machine.
There was a loud hiss as it lay for a moment across the hot engine, and it whisked itself into the air again, while the huge flat body drew itself together as if in sudden pain. I dipped in a vol-piqué, but again a tentacle fell over the monoplane and was shorn off by the propeller as easily as it might have cut through a smoke-wreath.
A long, gliding, sticky, serpent-like coil came from behind and caught me round the waist, dragging me out of the fuselage. I tore at it, my fingers sinking into the smooth, glue-like surface, and for an instant I disengaged myself, but only to be caught round the boot by another coil, which gave me a jerk that tilted me almost on to my back.
As I fell I blazed off both barrels of my gun, though indeed, it was like attacking an elephant with a pea-shooter to imagine that any human weapon could cripple that mighty bulk. And yet I aimed better than I knew, for, with a loud report, one of the great blisters upon the creature’s back exploded with the puncture of the buckshot.
It was very clear that my conjecture was right, and that these vast clear bladders were distended with some lifting gas, for in an instant the huge cloud-like body turned sideways, writhing desperately to find its balance, while the white beak snapped and gaped in horrible fury. But already I had shot away on the steepest glide that I dared to attempt, my engine still full on, the flying propeller and the force of gravity shooting me downwards like an aerolite. Far behind me I saw a dull, purplish smudge growing swiftly smaller and merging into the blue sky behind it. I was safe out of the deadly jungle of the outer air.
Once out of danger I throttled my engine, for nothing tears a machine to pieces quicker than running on full power from a height. It was a glorious spiral vol-plané from nearly eight miles of altitude—first, to the level of the silver cloud-bank, then to that of the storm-clouds beneath it, and finally, in beating rain, to the surface of the earth.
I saw the Bristol Channel beneath me as I broke from the clouds, but, having still some petrol in my tank, I got twenty miles inland before I found myself stranded in a field half a mile from the village of Ashcombe. Then I got three tins of petrol from a passing motor-car, and at ten minutes past six that evening I alighted gently in my own home meadow at Devizes, after such a journey as no mortal on earth has ever yet taken and lived to tell the tale.
I have seen the beauty and I have seen the horror of the heights—and greater beauty or horror than that is not within the ken of man.
And now it is my plan to go once again before I give my results to the world. My reason for this is that I must surely have something to show by way of proof before I lay such a tale before my fellow men. It is true that others will soon follow and will confirm what I have said, and yet I should wish to carry conviction from the first.
Those lovely iridescent bubbles of the air should not be hard to capture. They drift slowly upon their way, and the swift monoplane could intercept their leisurely course. It is likely enough that they would dissolve in the heavier layers of the atmosphere, and that some small heap of amorphous jelly might be all that I should bring back to earth with me. And yet something there would surely be by which I could substantiate my story.
Yes, I will go, even if I run a risk by doing so. These purple horrors would not seem to be numerous. It is probable that I shall not see one. If I do I shall dive at once. At the worst there is always the shotgun and my knowledge of
Here a page of the manuscript is unfortunately missing. On the next page is written, in large, straggling writing:
Forty thousand feet. I shall never see earth again. They are beneath me, three of them. God help me; it is a dreadful death to die!
*
Such, in its entirety, is the Joyce-Armstrong Statement.
Of the man nothing has since been seen. Pieces of his shattered monoplane have been picked up on the preserves of Mr. Budd-Lushington, upon the borders of Kent and Sussex, within a few miles of the spot where the notebook was discovered. If the unfortunate aviator’s theory is correct that this air-jungle, as he called it, existed only over the south-west of England, then it would seem that he had fled from it at the full speed of his monoplane, but had been overtaken and devoured by these horrible creatures at some spot in the outer atmosphere above the place where the grim relics were found.
The picture of that monoplane skimming down the sky, with the nameless terrors flying as swiftly beneath it and cutting it off always from the earth while they gradually closed in upon their victim, is one upon which a man who valued his sanity would prefer not to dwell. There are many, as I am aware, who still jeer at the facts which I have here set down, but even they must admit that Joyce-Armstrong has disappeared, and I would commend to them his own words:
“This notebook may explain what I am trying to do, and how I lost my life in doing it. But no drivel about accidents or mysteries, if you please.”
* * *
1 When this story was written, the altitude record for an aircraft—set, as subsequently noted in the history, by Roland Garros, in September 1912—was 18,405 feet. In our history thirty thousand feet was first attained in June 1919 by Jean Casale. As the story also notes further on, Henry Coxwell and James Glaisher had ascended higher than thirty thousand feet in a balloon in 1862, but the latter lost consciousness due to the low air pressure and intense cold, deterring anyone else from attempting to break their record until 1927, when Hawthorne Gray succeeded, but died when his oxygen supply ran out.
2 André Beaumont was the pseudonym of the French aviation pioneer Jean Louis Conneau (1880–1937), who won several air races in 1911 and co-founded Franco-British Aviation in London and Paris in 1913.
APPENDIX
A Chronology of the Most Important Longer Works of Scientific Romance Published between 1830 and August 1914
1833 Charles Nodier “Hurlubeu” & “Léviathan le Long” (Fr, tr. as “Perfectibility”)
1835 Edgar Allan Poe “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” (U.S.)
1836 Louis-Napoléon Geoffroy Napoléon et la conquête du monde (Fr, tr. as The Apocryphal Napoleon)
1846 Émile Souvestre Le Monde tel qu’íl sera (Fr, tr. as The World as It Shall Be)
1848 Edgar Allan Poe Eureka: A Prose Poem (U.S.)
1859 Herrmann Lang The Air Battle (UK)
1862 Edmond About L’Homme à l’oreille cassée (Fr, tr. as The Man with the Broken Ear)
1863 Jules Verne Cinq semaines en ballon (Fr, tr. as Five Weeks in a Balloon)
1864 Jules Verne Voyage au centre de la terre (Fr, tr. as Journey to the Centre of the Earth)
1865 Jules Verne De la terre
à la lune (Fr, tr. as From the Earth to the Moon)
1869 Edward Everett Hale “The Brick Moon” (U.S.)
Jules Verne Autour de la lune (Fr, tr. as Around the Moon)
1870 Jules Verne Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Fr, tr. as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea)
1871 Edward Bulwer-Lytton The Coming Race (UK)
George T. Chesney “The Battle of Dorking” (UK)
1872 Samuel Butler Erewhon; or, Over the Range (UK)
1874 Andrew Blair Annals of the Twenty-Ninth Century (UK)
1877 Jules Verne Hector Servadac (Fr, tr. as Hector Servadac)
1879 Jules Verne (and Paschal Grousset) Les Cinq cent millions de la Bégum (Fr, tr. as The Begum’s Fortune)
1880 Edward Bellamy Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process (U.S.)
Percy Greg Across the Zodiac (UK)
1883 Didier de Chousy Ignis (Fr, tr. as Ignis: The Central Fire)
Albert Robida Le Vingtième siècle (Fr, tr. as The Twentieth Century)
1884 Edwin Abbott (as “A Square”) Flatland (UK)
1885 Richard Jefferies After London (UK)
1886 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam L’Ève future (Fr, tr. as The Future Eve)
Jules Verne Robur le conquérant (Fr, tr. as The Clipper of the Clouds)
1887 W. H. Hudson A Crystal Age (UK)
J.-H. Rosny “Les Xipéhuz” (Fr, tr. as “The Xipehuz)
1888 Edward Bellamy Looking Backward 2000–1887 (U.S.)
Walter Besant The Inner House (UK)
1889 Louis Boussenard Dix mille ans dans un bloc de glace (Fr, tr. as Ten Thousand Years in a Block of Ice)
Edgar Fawcett “Solarion” (US)
Hugh MacColl Mr. Stranger’s Sealed Packet (UK)
John Ames Mitchell The Last American (US)
Mark Twain A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (US)
1890 Robert Cromie A Plunge into Space (UK)
Ignatius Donnelly Caesar’s Column (US)
William Morris News from Nowhere (UK)
1892 Ignatius Donnelly The Golden Bottle (US)
Albert Robida La Vie électrique (Fr, tr. as Electric Life)
1893 Camille Flammarion La Fin du Monde (Fr, tr. as Omega: The End of the World)
George Griffith The Angel of the Revolution (UK)
1894 George Griffith Olga Romanoff (UK)
Gustavus W. Pope Journey to Mars (US)
1895 Grant Allen The British Barbarians (UK)
Robert Cromie The Crack of Doom (UK)
John Davidson A Full and True Account of the Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender (UK)
Edgar Fawcett The Ghost of Guy Thyrle (US)
George Griffith The Outlaws of the Air (UK)
C. H. Hinton Stella and An Unfinished Communication (UK)
Jules Verne L’Île à hélice (Fr, tr. as Propellor Island)
H. G. Wells The Time Machine (UK)
1896 H. G. Wells The Island of Dr Moreau (UK)
1897 Fred T. Jane To Venus in Five Seconds (UK)
H. G. Wells The Invisible Man (UK)
1898 Paul Adam Lettres de Malaisie (Fr, tr. as “Letters from Malaisie”)
Clement Fézandie Through the Earth (US)
M. P. Shiel The Yellow Danger (UK)
Frank R. Stockton The Great Stone of Sardis (US)
Stanley Waterloo Armageddon (US)
H. G. Wells The War of the Worlds (UK)
1899 Fred T. Jane The Violet Flame (UK)
H. G. Wells “A Story of the Days to Come” (UK)
———When the Sleeper Wakes (UK)
1900 Robert William Cole The Struggle for Empire (UK)
Garrett P. Serviss The Moon Metal (US)
1901 Joseph Conrad & Ford Maddox Hueffer The Inheritors (UK)
George Griffith A Honeymoon in Space (UK)
M. P. Shiel The Lord of the Sea (UK)
———The Purple Cloud (UK)
H. G. Wells The First Men in the Moon (UK)
1902 Alfred Jarry Le Surmâle (Fr, tr. as The Supermale)
1904 Robert W. Chambers In Search of the Unknown (US)
G. K. Chesterton The Napoleon of Notting Hill (UK)
André Couvreur Caresco surhomme (Fr, tr. as Caresco, Superman)
H. G. Wells The Food of the Gods and How it Came to Earth (UK)
1905 Edwin Lester Arnold Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (UK)
Vincent Harper The Mortgage on the Brain (US)
Rudyard Kipling With the Night Mail (UK)
1906 Jules Hoche Le Faiseur d’hommes et sa formule (Fr, tr. as The Maker of Men and His Formula)
V. T. Sutphen The Doomsman (US)
1907 Charles Derennes Le Peuple du pôle (Fr, tr. as The People of the Pole)
C. H. Hinton An Episode of Flatland (UK)
William Hope Hodgson The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (UK)
Jack London The Iron Heel (US)
1908 John Davidson The Testament of John Davidson (UK)
James Elroy Flecker The Last Generation (UK)
William Hope Hodgson The House on the Borderland (UK)
Maurice Renard Le Docteur Lerne, sous-dieu (Fr, tr. as Doctor Lerne, Subgod)
H. G. Wells The War in the Air (UK)
1909 E. M. Forster “The Machine Stops” (UK)
Garrett P. Serviss A Columbus of Space (US)
1910 J.-H. Rosny “La Mort de la terre” (Fr, tr. as “The Death of the Earth”)
1911 J. D. Beresford The Hampdenshire Wonder (UK)
Maurice Renard Le Péril bleu (Fr, tr. as The Blue Peril)
Garrett P. Serviss The Second Deluge (US)
1912 Edgar Rice Burroughs “Under the Moons of Mars” (US)
Arthur Conan Doyle The Lost World (UK)
George Allan England “Darkness and Dawn” (US)
William Hope Hodgson The Night Land (UK)
Jack London “The Scarlet Plague” (US)
Gaston de Pawlowski Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension (Fr, tr. as Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension)
1913 J. D. Beresford Goslings (UK)
Arthur Conan Doyle The Poison Belt (UK)
J.-H. Rosny La Force Mystérieuse (Fr, tr. as “The Mysterious Force”)
1914 Edmond Haraucourt Daâh, le premier homme (Fr, tr. as Daâh, the First Human)
Han Ryner Les Pacifiques (Fr, tr. as “The Pacifists”)
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