existent in our little world-in which my senses had slipped their moorings, as it were.
My waking was a slow affair, and reality and dream were inextricably tangled. That strange blue quality of the sunlight produced the wildest and most horrible effects upon my bewildered senses. It became a legion of ghostly monsters, from whom I madly fled for what seemed centuries of time. From this horror I was at last rescued by returning consciousness, but, indeed, it was only to find myself in another-in that indescribable feeling of disembodiment of which I have spoken.
"Morning, Rider," greeted Henry.
"How did you sleep?"
"Like Dante," I told him.
"Ditto," said Morgan St. Cloud.
"And you?" I asked Henry.
"Like a top."
"Good heavens! Is there anything you're not immune to?
"I suppose I'll become Rider Farner main again some time, somewhere," I added; "but certainly I am somebody- something else now. Probably if I had shrunk as I lost weight, I'd feel natural!"
"What a nightmare!" he laughed. "But I weigh less than two ounces! Isn't that what you said?"
"That's what you do. But wait till you stand on Venus; you'll weigh about one hundred and thirty-five pounds, as against your hundred and sixty on Terra."
"Oh, happy day!"
"Wait till you see!" admonished St. Cloud.
Henry raised a finger and shook it at Morgan.
"Doubting Thomas!" he said. "That man needs much whom nothing will content,"
St. Cloud smiled his dark smile.
"Let's have breakfast," he said.
At first the strangeness of the thing kept us highly keyed up, but everything palls, even (so I've heard) a sweetheart's kisses. But if the sweetheart was a Draconda, this could never be. But then, where was there ever a woman like Draconda?
Henry had brought about five dozen books for which wise provision I became profoundly thankful. At the time, though, I had thought it absurd. To suppose that we should want to read!
But we did, for here we were imprisoned in this steel shell with absolutely nothing to do but look; and we couldn't always be looking-even though the whole Universe, from the Pole Star to the Octant was at all times visible.
There, within a vast circle described about the southern celestial pole, were those stars which my eye had never seen on the earth. There blazed the great sun Canopus, second only to Sirius in brightness, though of a magnitude so vast that some have imagined that it must be the center of the sidereal system itself. (Another scientific pipe-dream.) There, too, by that mysterious void called the Coal Sack, shone the world-famous Southern Cross.
In my mind, however, this constellation (which, by the way, in ancient times belonged to Cenaturus and was visible in the middle latitudes of the north) is surpassed in beauty by the Northern Cross, in the constellation Cygnus- which glitters overhead in our late summer skies.
But here is a strange thing, though what meaning it may have or whether it has any, I do not presume to say: the Southern Cross-the mystic beauty of which has caught the imagination of Christendom - disappeared from the added; skies of the Holy City about the time Christ died on Calvary.
I have mentioned the change in the color of the sunlight-which, here in the ether deeps, was a pale, unearthly blue. And yet it really was not blue, either; it was-what shall I say?-only bluish.
Here enters, again, the earth's atmosphere, which scatters and destroys the blue rays from the sun, thus giving it (as seen from the earth) its yellow color. But with no atmosphere between, the great luminary is a pale blue. Towards. the edge of the disk, however-because the light there comes through the solar atmosphere at an oblique angle-the blue changes to the loveliest lilac upon which the eye ever lingered. And above this lilac were seen those scarlet flames, eruptive and quiescent, upon which scientists have bestowed the meaningless name "prominences" or "protuberances,"* and enveloping all the glorious corona itself.
On the earth the prominences can be seen only during the totality of a solar eclipse-though, of course, the scientist now can study them at any time by means of the spectroscope. However, all his attempts to render the corona perceptible have failed utterly, so that this radiant stellate mystery can be seen only when the moon hides the face of the sun -a phenomenon which never lasts more than a few minutes, and can not possibly last more than eight.
"It is unfortunate that no more appropriate and graphic name has yet been found for objects of such wonderful beauty and interest. -YOUNG.
But here (with the eye properly protected, of course) all this solar mystery and beauty was at all times visible.
Hour after hour Henry spent in studying the corona, setting down his observations with great care and fullness. This coronal nebulosity in which our sun is immersed is a thing of greater wonder and mystery than any scientist ever has dreamed, and of it some strange things could be told. But this is not the place, nor is this the pen, to set them down.
The days slowly passed, the reality (and the memory) involved in the eerie seeming of a dream-if the word day can be used in speaking of a time in which there was no day. For here in this appalling abyss, through which the Hornet was rushing on its way with a speed greater than that with which the earth bowls along in its orbit, there is only the profoundest night.
Outside, there was no such thing as sunshine, nothing but the intensest blackness, only pulsations (hypothetical) in the (hypothetical) ether-no such thing, Henry Quainfan said, as temperature even and yet there was the sunshine flooding through our windows!
It was some considerable time before I could get this strange physical paradox through my head.
Poor Keats! He was wrong after all!
The halfway point was passed on the eighth day. On the twelfth, three-fourths of the journey lay behind us, and we began to feel that we were getting somewhere.
DE PROFUNDIS
Venus was rapidly approaching the sun-a tiny new moon against the pearly radiance of the corona.
It was on the fifteenth day, in the "forenoon" that she moved onto the sun's disk, and Henry, so to speak, held her there. The planet was now the size of our satellite-encircled by that blazing ring of sun.
"Only a million miles more!" said Henry airily.
And now that the landing was imminent, I began to imagine-well, some of the wildest, most fantastic things that it ever entered the mind to conceive.
What of mystery and horror was there, under our eyes but hidden from their searching?
Of this world on which we would soon move inhabitants, we knew no more than when we had quitted our own, save only -Henry had discovered this, with his powerful field glasses-that the rapid rotation was the true one, though just how
