The Twenty-One Balloons PMC

by William Pene du Bois

  We had a delicious lunch which consisted simply of huge portions of Javaansche rijsttaffl which is Javanese rice cooked and curried as the Dutch do it in the Dutch East Indies. Krakatoa is actually part of the Dutch East Indies, though no Dutchman has ever cared to set foot on the Island. We had lots of this hot rice and huge glasses of wonderful cold Javanese tea. I was pretty hot from my freshly acquired sunburn. I was warm inside from this delicious hot curry; and after several stimulating glasses of tea, I had a nice warm feeling all over and was well prepared to give my talk.

  Mr. F. waited until all of the tables had been cleared by the D. family, then placed a chair on one of the tables. He silenced the crowd, introduced me as the speaker in a most informal and nice way, looked at me, and pointed to the chair. I climbed up on the table, sat down, and after the twenty families were all comfortably settled began my talk. The response to it was amazing and most gratifying. Each time I mentioned a new name, at least one face in the audience would light up. There would be much nudging of elbows, smiles, and faraway homesick looks. Giving this simple talk which seemed to bring so much genuine pleasure to these people was a tremendous joy to me. While I was talking all eyes were attentively fixed on me and I was looking around the room catching the reactions to each new name I mentioned and thinking up incidents to talk about next. Looking out of the window, I noticed that the ground seemed a little more active than usual. Being a new citizen of the Island I didn’t know whether there was anything unusual about this at first. I went on with my talk. As I recall it, before being most rudely interrupted by a singularly sinister event, I had talked over three hours. I noticed that the earth was moving with increasing violence. I looked at my watch. The movement of the earth’s surface usually subsided completely for a few minutes out of each hour, but that afternoon it had been getting increasingly violent over a period of two hours. This was quite alarming. I called this to the attention of the other people. They all turned and looked out of the windows. Some of them didn’t seem at all alarmed but others looked quite frightened. I was far from feeling at ease. Mr. M. walked over to the window and looked out. After a few minutes he said, “I don’t think it’s anything to get much alarmed over. After all, most of our houses were knocked down in ‘77.”

  “But they were simple huts,” said Mr. T.

  “I know, but they had diamond foundations too. This house hasn’t shown any signs of the slightest vibration. Please go on with your talk, Professor Sherman.”

  This seemed to reassure everyone considerably though I can’t say my heart was in my speech as much as before. I noticed that my audience was rather restless too. Suddenly —and this was a sight which is as vivid to me now as it was when I first saw it—the wall opposite me slowly and almost noiselessly opened up in a crack large enough to allow the sun to shine through. It was the most terrifying and sinister sight I have ever seen. A considerable amount of powdered plaster dropped on the heads of the families in the room and the windows near the cracked wall broke open. The windows had all been closed so that the usual noise of the mountain wouldn’t interfere with my talk. Now, through the crack in the wall and through the broken windows, the rumblings of the mountain thundered in full force.

  Mr. M. rushed to the table where I was sitting, leaped onto it, and immediately started shouting instructions. “I want all of the women and little children to run to the platform at once and start taking the covers off the balloons! I want all of the men to run quickly to their houses and grab their family parachutes (hearing the word ‘parachute’ at that moment came to me like a blow on the head) and dash to the balloon platform! I want the six boys who are fifteen years old to take whatever food Mrs. D. has prepared for tonight and rush it to the platform!” He clapped his hands loudly and the room was emptied at once. He turned to me and said, “We’ve rehearsed this a thousand times; don’t be alarmed, Professor Sherman, I am confident that everything will turn out all right. We’ll be off in less than fifteen minutes. Now,” he said, “you’re the only man with no particular job at this time. We all have pretty large amounts of diamonds sewn into a pouch attached to our family parachutes. Why don’t you take a bucket and see if you can get to the mines and grab some diamonds? A few big ones will take care of you quite nicely. But don’t go near the mines if it’s too dangerous, please, Sherman, don’t go near the mines if....” He was shouting after me, for I was off for the mines like a madman as soon as I got the gist of his suggestion. Unfortunately for me this was a waste of time. It was impossible to approach the mountain. I knew I had just a little over ten minutes time, the time needed to fill the balloons. I tried running—the action of the earth’s surface threw me to the ground. I tried walking —I doddered, staggered, floundered, and tumbled. I tried crawling, but the earth’s rumblings and heavings kept rolling me over on my side. I looked up at the mountain ahead and saw at once that it would be impossible to reach in the short time allotted me. I threw away my bucket, turned, and ran through the village for the platform, reeling, buckling, and falling every few feet of the way. I was the last to see the Village of Krakatoa from the ground. I was there in time to see the crystal Krakatoan house splinter and flatten to the ground in a great shower of broken glass. The M.’s Moroccan house full of those amazing inventions was burning like a huge plum pudding, due no doubt to a short circuit in the electric livingroom. When I arrived at the balloon platform, it was straining at the hoses ready to leap. There were many hands extended my way. I reached up and my arms were grabbed just as the balloon platform tore itself away. I was lifted onto the platform. I remember twenty pops like champagne corks in rapid succession as the rubber ball-and-socket connections were broken, and the eighty-one Krakatoans swiftly bounded off into the air.

  The first moments on the platform were bedlam. Some of the women were screaming. Some of the children were crying. The men were feverishly trying to connect the hoses to the hydrogen tank, and the boys who controlled the levers allowing gas to enter the balloons were shouting at the men to hurry up so that they could level the platform. We were flying right at the mountain on an uncomfortable slant and we weren’t gaining altitude very fast. It required a certain amount of patience and a hundred-and-fifty-pound push to snap the hose connections together. The men in their frantic hurry would each grab an end of hose, start pushing them together toward each other, then slip and bang their heads. Three minutes after our takeoff, everybody was shouting at once except me. I was afraid to interfere in this supposedly well-rehearsed maneuver for fear of receiving an excited, angry punch in the nose.

  The hoses were finally all connected in one of those desperate last-minute-action moments of confusion. Every boy added gas to his balloon at once. Mr. M. dumped the water used to insulate the hydrogen tank off the platform with a trip of a foot lever, and the giant platform rose just in time to clear the mountaintop. We flew directly over the crater. Here, instead of being sucked downward by the vacuum as we had been in the Balloon Merry-Go-Round when the mountain was calm, we were greeted by a roaring swift upward blast of hot air which catapulted us far up into the sky. When we were about a half mile up, we were comparatively still. There might have been a little wind, but it wasn’t strong enough to blow us off this hot sulphurous airshaft. We were trapped on top of it like those celluloid balls on upward streams of water in shooting galleries. Ladies and Gentlemen, we spent the night, a horribly long sleepless broiling night, on top of this volcano. The heat of the air from the crater and the altitude to which we were lifted caused the hydrogen to dilate in the balloons until they looked ready to burst. It was impossible to consider adding more hydrogen to the balloons in an attempt to get high enough to get off this airshaft and it would have been idiotic to let gas out of the balloons and thus lower ourselves nearer the inferno. The one relieving aspect of that miserable night was that the upward current of air kept the platform nice and level, though we swayed back and forth rather violently at times. The light from the blazing crater made everything up where
we were bright red. This considerably intensified the heat. It was bad enough to be broiling without looking bright red too. This was indeed an ironic state of affairs: It was the highest any of us had ever flown and still we each had the feeling that this was closer to a sensation of hell than anything we had ever experienced before. I suppose too that our food was kept warm, though no one thought of eating anything that night.

  We spent seventeen hours over the volcano, from five o‘clock in the afternoon of the 26th until ten o’clock the following morning. At that time the shaft of hot air seemed to have lost its strength. We were lowered to an altitude of about one hundred feet above the mountain, or roughly fifteen hundred feet above sea level; and there a wind cleared us of that dreadful crater. The boys busied themselves keeping the platform level again, and the men and women of Krakatoa gave longing looks at their Island believing that the eruptions had ceased and that they had been foolish to leave. I cannot say that I shared this feeling at all. There wasn’t a house left standing and I had no desire to return to this now desolate and fearful place even if the diamond mines were intact.

  We flew until we were a mile over Java when, with stunning suddenness, the Island of Krakatoa in seven rapid ear-splitting explosions blew up straight into the air for as far as we could see. Our flying platform was rocked back and forth at thirty-degree angles by the concussions. Those of us who were near the balustrade hung on for life. A few of those who were in the middle of the platform were tossed about like flapjacks in a skillet. We were twenty-seven miles away from the Island when it happened, which was just about far enough away for safety. Any closer and we would have been dumped right off the platform into the Sunda Strait. We couldn’t see what was left of Krakatoa because it was wrapped in a thick huge tremendously tall black cloud of pumice, ashes, smoke, lava, dirt, with I suppose a few billion dollars worth of diamonds thrown in. We were fortunate in that the explosion was followed by a strong air current, produced in the same manner as waves on the surface of a lake when a stone is thrown in. We were swiftly being taken away from the scene of the eruption.

  We were afraid that ashes, rocks, or even diamonds might fall on us and pierce our balloons, but all that actually happened of that nature was that we were soon enveloped by the thick black dust cloud which was so dense that it was almost impossible to see through, making it extremely difficult to keep the platform level. We traveled with this cloud for hours, not being able to see whether ground or sea was beneath us and fearing the horrible fate of crashing into a mountaintop in Java. We tied handkerchiefs around our faces so that we wouldn’t breathe too much of the thick concentration of powdered ashes and pumice we were traveling with, and it seemed for a while that as long as the wind was with us, the powdered remains of Krakatoa would follow along and that we would be forever enveloped in this ghost of a dead island. The wind generated by the explosion was tremendous and for the entire duration of this extraordinary journey we were hurtling through space at a fabulous speed.

  The food situation, now that I look back at it, was the funniest I’m sure in the history of life-raft travel. We had three huge caldrons of a Dutch dish Mrs. D. had prepared for dinner the night of the eruption. This dish was called Stampot van zuurkool met rookworst. We also had a huge jug of Van Houten’s cocoa and a crate of Gouda cheeses. I have heard of shipwrecked men living for days on hardtack and water, but we citizens of the former Island of Krakatoa lived on Stampot van zuurkool met rookworst. This was a dish consisting of meat cooked in gravy, sauerkraut, and sausages. Mr. M., the man who first discovered the diamond mines of Krakatoa and who persuaded the twenty other families to go and live there, felt responsible for them all at this moment of crisis. He supervised the rationing of the food, allowing but meager portions of Stampot van zuurkool met rookworst to each person and three swallows of cocoa with each meal. He also advised every family except one to jump off at the first sight of land, no matter what country it might be. “I have a good reason for this,” he said: “Professor Sherman has no parachute. He will have to try and land the platform. It would be impossible and foolish for him to consider landing the platform on land, he will have to risk crashing it in some body of water. The family that volunteers to remain with him will help him control the balloons until water is sighted. They will then jump off, leaving the platform to Professor Sherman. I want every family except one to jump off as soon as possible so that as much food as can possibly be left over will be available to Professor Sherman whose journey over land might take him many days. With this in mind, the crate of cheeses, which are less perishable than the rest of the food, will be left intact for him.”

  I paid a considerable amount of attention to this speech of his in which I seemed to be leading man and most unhappy actor of a forthcoming melodrama.

  Mr. M. then asked if any family wanted to volunteer to stay with me until the proper time was at hand for me to attempt a landing in the water. The F.’s volunteered immediately which cheered me up a great deal.

  On the afternoon of the second day, the black cloud had thinned out sufficiently so that we could see that we were no longer flying over Java. I have since tried to reconstruct the voyage on the balloon platform and I believe we were flying at that time over the Indian Ocean. On the afternoon of the third day we sighted land and nineteen of the families gave forth with rousing cheers, embraced each other, and broke into happy dances. The F.’s ran to my side to comfort me, to show me that they had no intentions of leaving me until they had seen me safely to another body of water.

  We were soon no longer over water but flying over thickly vegetated jungles. Mr. M. was leaning intently over the balustrade studying the nature of the country. He pointed out teakwood trees and sandalwood trees and observed the redness of the earth. “This is India,” he said.

  The nineteen families happily started readying their family parachutes. These were well designed; I shall describe them as best I can. There was a square silk sheet stretched out by two stout bamboo poles crossed diagonally from corner to corner. At each corner of the sheet was a parachute, and from each of these hung two straps attached to a belt harness. Each member of a family put on one of these belt harnesses, and when they jumped, mother, father, and the two children all descended together with the bamboo poles keeping them far enough apart so there was no danger of their bumping into each other in midair.

  The families were all anxiously looking out for a nice spot to land on. At first we flew over nothing but dense jungle life, then we sighted a few small villages. Mr. M. advised everybody to avoid coming down in a village because the natives might not know what to make of parachutes. They waited until they saw a proper spot in the distance which was a rather soft-looking plateau, said goodbye to the F.’s and me, earnestly wishing us the best of luck, then all jumped at once so as to be together after they landed. The balloon platform lunged into the air when relieved of this weight and Mr. F., Mrs. F., F-1, F-2, and I continued on, a dreadful nine more days, which took us across India, Persia, Turkey, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Belgium, where the F. family finally left me, and took me on alone over England until I was at last able to crash the platform into the Atlantic.

  We had warm August and September weather and a magnificent wind, but except for the Dardanelles, which were too narrow to land in. we traveled clear across Europe missing every body of water. We missed the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea. and the Mediterranean. The five of us spent nine miserable days together, living mostly on cheese, rummaging through our barrels of food like dogs in garbage cans, separating the spoiled food from the good, drinking rationed amounts of sauerkraut juice and stale cocoa, sleeping uncomfortably in four-hour shifts, and running around from balloon to balloon keeping the platform level until we thought we’d drop dead from exhaustion. On the ninth day we were over Belgium and we sighted the English Channel. I said goodbye to my friends the F.’s and helped them fix up their parachute. I sadly watched them as they dropped slowly to the earth below, then started to attempt
to land the platform.

  In order to get at the valves which release the hydrogen from the balloons, I had to break the hose connections with which they were attached to the tank. This, as you will recall, required a hundred-and-fifty-pound pull. I realized when I started to pull one apart that I didn’t have enough strength left in me to do this fast enough to be able to land the platform in the Channel. I was afraid that the distance required to land the platform smoothly would take me clear across and I’d crash into the shores of England. So, tired as I was, I resolved to spend the afternoon flying over England. At seven o’lock at night, flying over Scotland, I sighted the Atlantic Ocean and started a tug of war with each hose until I got all of the connections apart. Then I started to descend.

  My trip ended in a two-hour uphill run. Every time I let the gas out of one side of the platform, I’d have to run up the platform to the high side and let the gas out of that, then run back uphill to the other side, from end to end, across and back, to and fro on a perpetual incline until I finally crashed into the Atlantic. I kept being reminded of a vaudeville act I had once seen in the London Music Hall. A Negro clown, dressed like a porter in a railroad station, played “God Save the King” running back and forth on the stage with hammers, striking the ties of the railroad tracks. One tune on this giant “xylophone” of his and he flopped on the stage exhausted as the audience rocked with laughter. I assure you I must have been awfully close to death when Captain Simon of the S.S.Cunningham sighted me and picked me up twenty minutes after my crash. The rest of my story you know, I believe. If you have any questions I’ll gladly try to answer them.

  The huge audience rose as one and acclaimed Professor Sherman with thunderous cheers and applause. After ten minutes of this hubbub, the Mayor, who had been wildly shaking the Professor’s hand and patting him on the back, walked upstage and held up his hands to quiet the audience. “Have you any questions?” he asked.