"I wonder if I've passed Vienna in the night," he thought. "It ought
not to have taken me more than a few hours to reach there from Paris."
Vienna was at that moment fifteen hundred miles behind him; but Rob's
geography had always been his stumbling block at school, and he had
not learned to gage the speed of the traveling machine; so he was
completely mystified as to his whereabouts.
Presently a village having many queer spires and minarets whisked by
him like a flash. Rob became worried, and resolved to slow up at the
next sign of habitation.
This was a good resolution, but Turkestan is so thinly settled
that before the boy could plan out a course of action he had passed
the barren mountain range of Thian-Shan as nimbly as an acrobat
leaps a jumping-bar.
"This won't do at all!" he exclaimed, earnestly. "The traveling
machine seems to be running away with me, and I'm missing no end of
sights by scooting along up here in the clouds."
He turned the indicator to zero, and was relieved to find it obey with
customary quickness. In a few moments he had slowed up and stopped,
when he found himself suspended above another stretch of sandy plain.
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