The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall

The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall

Rotterdam's Exchange square erupts in astonishment when a balloon fashioned from dirty newspapers descends from the clouds, its car a huge drab beaver hat suspended by blue ribbons, and its two-foot-tall occupant — grotesque, hugely handed, wholly earless — recognized by the vrow Grettel Pfaall as her long-missing husband Hans Pfaall, a bellows-mender who vanished five years earlier with three companions amid rumors of murder. The dwarfish aeronaut drops a heavy sealed letter at the feet of burgomaster Superbus Von Underduk, then dumps his sandbags squarely onto the burgomaster's back, sending him rolling before the balloon soars off behind a cloud and vanishes. The letter, addressed to Von Underduk and Professor Rubadub of the Rotterdam College of Astronomy, is opened and read aloud. In it, Hans Pfaall explains that ruinous poverty — his bellows trade destroyed by a populace obsessed with revolutionary politics — drove him toward suicide until a treatise on speculative astronomy, found at a workseller's stall, and a secret about pneumatics from a cousin in Nantz turned his despair toward a wilder scheme: a voyage to the moon. Feigning conciliation toward three ruthless creditors who hounded him, he enlisted their unwitting labor while secretly selling his goods, borrowing money, and assembling an oversized muslin-and-caoutchouc balloon, a specially modified condensing apparatus after M. Grimm's design, and a buried arsenal of powder-charged casks. On the first of April, after swearing his wife to secrecy, he lured his three creditors to help inflate the balloon, ignited a slow match to the buried powder as a parting act of vengeance, cut loose, and shot upward as a tremendous explosion of fire and debris erupted below, hurling him from the car to dangle by a foot-entangled cord until he clawed his way back in with a makeshift hook fashioned from his breeches buckle and cravat. Recovering over the open ocean, he sights a British man-of-war, then methodically details his reasoning for believing a lunar voyage possible: calculations of the earth-moon distance, the diminishing density of atmosphere with altitude, arguments from Encke's comet and the zodiacal light for a rarefied ethereal medium pervading the solar system, and his hope of condensing thin air into breathable atmosphere via his apparatus. As he ascends he suffers violent pain, bleeding from nose and ears, and near-fatal symptoms after recklessly discharging ballast, relieved only by bleeding himself with a penknife. His cat, smuggled aboard, bears kittens mid-flight, one of Pfaall's experiments in testing whether creatures born amid rarefied air suffer differently than the mother; the kittens later drop away, container and all, through an accident with a valve loop. Encasing the car in an airtight gum-elastic chamber fed by his condenser, he restores breathable air, releases his pigeons (one dies, one escapes), and devises a water-clock apparatus to wake him hourly through the night for air-regeneration. Day by day he logs the ascent: crossing the Arctic ice cap and glimpsing the North Pole itself as a dark, ice-rimmed circle; drifting south over the Great Lakes and the Mexican Gulf; hearing repeated terrifying crackling roars later explained as passing meteoric stones; and gradually curving into the moon's orbital plane. On the seventeenth day he wakes in horror believing the balloon has burst and he is plummeting to earth, only to realize the bouleversement is natural — he has crossed the point where lunar gravity supersedes terrestrial, and the moon now lies beneath him. He describes the moon's earless, speechless inhabitants, its waterless volcanic terrain, and its violent climate extremes, while dread at plunging supersedes wonder as his descent accelerates uncontrollably. Jettisoning ballast, water-kegs, condenser, and finally his coat, hat, and boots, he cuts the car loose entirely and tumbles into a fantastical city among grinning, silent, earless little people, beholding the earth above him as a great copper shield rimmed in gold. Pfaall closes the letter explaining he has lived five years on the moon, has much to reveal about its climate, inhabitants, and mysteries of its permanently hidden far side, but will disclose nothing further unless the College secures him a pardon for the deaths of his creditors, to be delivered by the earless lunar messenger who bore the letter. Rubadub and Von Underduk are astonished and resolve to seek the pardon, but discover the messenger has vanished, rendering the pardon moot. The narrative closes by noting the letter provoked wide gossip, with skeptics dismissing it as a hoax — citing local wags' grudges against the burgomaster and astronomers, a missing earless dwarf from Bruges, the distinctly Rotterdam origin of the newspapers covering the balloon, and reports that Pfaall and his three "creditors" were recently seen drinking in a local tavern, flush with money, having just returned from a trip abroad.

By Edgar Allan Poe · First published 1835 · Genre: Science Fiction, Adventure, Fantasy · 21,433 words

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With a heart of furious fancies,

Whereof I am commander,

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The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall is listed on Textopian as a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, dated 1835 CE.

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Science Fiction · Space Travel · Satire · Humor · Adventure · Fantasy · Speculative Fiction · Early Science Fiction · Pneumatic Tube · Subterranean Journey · Balloon Flight · Escape from Earth

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