ON THE OCCASION of the celebration of the new tury, there was an innovative program of public ceremohe most memorable of which was the first journey in a balloon, the fruit of the boundless initiative of Dr. Juvenal Urbino. Half the city gathered on the Arsenal Beach to express their wonderment at the ast of the enormous balloon made of taffeta in the colors of the flag, which carried the first airmail to San Juan de la aga, some thirty leagues to the northeast as the crow flies. Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his wife, who had experiehe excitement of flight at the World』s Fair in Paris, were the first to climb into the wicker basket, followed by the pilot and six distinguished guests. They were carrying a letter from the Governor of the Provio the municipal officials of San Juan de la aga, in which it was doted for all time that this was the first mail transported through the air. A journalist from the ercial Daily asked Dr. Juvenal Urbino for his final words in the event he perished during the adventure, and he did not even take the time to think about the ahat would earn him so much abuse.
「In my opinion,」 he said, 「the eenth tury is passing for everyone except us.」
Lost in the guileless crowd that sang the national anthem as the balloon gained altitude, Florentino Ariza felt himself in agreement with the person whose ents he heard over the din, to the effect that this was not a suitable exploit for a woma of all one as old as Fermina Daza. But it was not so dangerous after all. Or at least not so much dangerous as depressing. The balloon reached its destination without i after a peaceful trip through an incredible blue sky. They flew well and very low, with a calm, favorable wind, first along the spurs of the snow-covered mountains and thehe vastness of the Great S.
From the sky they could see, just as God saw them, the ruins of the very old and heroic city of Cartagena de Indias, the most beautiful in the world, abandoned by its inhabitants because of the cholera panic after three turies of resistao the sieges of the English and the atrocities of the bueers. They saw the walls still intact, the brambles ireets, the fortifications devoured by heartsease, the marble palaces and the golden altars and the Viceroys rotting with plague iheir armor.
They flew over the lake dwellings of the Trojas in Cataca, painted in lunatic colors, with pens holding iguanas raised for food and balsam apples and crepe myrtle hanging in the lacustrine gardeed by everyone』s shouting, hundreds of naked children plunged into the water, jumping out of windows, jumping from the roofs of the houses and from the oes that they handled with astonishing skill, and diving like shad to recover the bundles of clothing, the bottles of cough syrup, the benefit food that the beautiful lady with the feathered hat threw to them from the basket of the balloon.
They flew over the dark o of the banana plantations, whose silence reached them like a lethal vapor, and Fermina Daza remem-bered herself at the age of three, perhaps four, walking through the shadowy forest holding the hand of her mother, who was almost a girl herself, surrounded by other women dressed in muslin, just like her mother, with white parasols and hats made of gauze. The pilot, who was the world through a spyglass, said: 「They seem dead.」 He passed the spyglass to Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who saw the oxcarts in the cultivated fields, the boundary lines of the railroad tracks, the blig