When the aneroid told Tinker that the car had reached the height of 3000 feet, he opened a valve, and let the gas escape slowly from the balloon.

The instant she began to sink he switched to a slight downward angle the great planes, some seventy feet long, which were fixed parallel to the car.

The machine began to glide downwards on them, gathering momentum from the weight of the car, at a quickly increasing speed, until she was tearing through the air at the rate of forty miles an hour, and sinking a hundred feet in the mile.

The financier sat hunched up, gasping and shivering as the air whizzed past his ears and shrilled among the ropes.

Tinker, with an air of cheerful excitement, kept the machine on her course, and watched the aneroid: his face of a seraph was peculiarly appropriate to these high altitudes, though the millionaire was too busy with his fears to observe the fact.
In half an hour the machine had rushed down to five hundred feet above the sea: Tinker switched the planes to the same angle upwards: and the momentum drove her up the incline of the air with little diminished speed.