In ecstasy I was admiring the beauty of this mixed rainbow when all of a sudden I felt my insides being shaken up in the way that one feels shaken when being moved by a pulley. I was going to open the hatch in order to see the cause of this feeling, but as I was putting forth my hand I noticed through the hole in the floor of my box that my tower was already far below me and my little flying castle. By shifting my feet to one side, I was able to get a full view of Toulouse, which was rapidly sinking beneath me.
This extraordinary event astonished me, not because of the quickness of the movement, but because of the way human reason is astonished at the success of a plan the very imagination of which can make us fearful. The rest of it didn?t particularly surprise me, for I had well planned that the vacuum that would pertain in the icosahedron because of the rays of the Sun striking the concave lenses would draw into it a furious abundance of air, by which my box would rise, and that, as I rose, the wind which would rush in through the hole in the box could not rise up to the arc in the top except by a rapid movement that would lift the entire apparatus...
I recall that in less than an hour I was above the middle region of the sky. I noticed this immediately, since I could see it hail and rain below me. One may well ask where all this wind came from (that is, the wind which made my box rise), in a stratum of the sky with no meteors to cause air movement. But if you will listen carefully, I will answer this objection. I say that the Sun which vigorously struck my concave mirrors connected all of its rays in the center of the vase, forcing out all of the air, and that thus the vase remained empty. Nature, which abhors a vacuum, filled it through the opening in the bottom, and in this way one should not be amazed that in a region above the middle zone, where winds are, I continued nevertheless to rise, for the ether around me became wind because of the furious speed with which it was sucked in to fill up the vacuum, and thus it continued ceaselessly to push my machine.
I was scarcely tormented by hunger, except when I crossed this middle region, for the cold of the climate made me view hunger from afar. I say from afar because of a bottle of brandy which I carried with me, and from which I took occasional gulps, which kept hunger away.
During the rest of my journey I felt no other weakness. To the contrary, the closer I came to the Sun, the stronger I felt. I felt my face become hotter, and I was livelier than usual. My hands seemed colored with an agreeable red, and some unfamiliar joy flowed through my blood which took me right out of myself into a kind of ecstasy.
The sphere of our world now appeared to me as a star more or less the same size as the Moon appears when viewed from Earth. And as I continued to rise it shrank in size, until it became a bluish star, and then nothing, as the luminous point shrank to the size of the last ray of light, until it finally blended into the color of the heavens.
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