agnificent spectacle upon which the party looked out. Beneath
them, and as far as the eye could reach on every hand, stretched the
vast, unbroken sea of cloud, heaped together in gigantic masses of the
most extraordinary shapes, as though some giant hand had strewn a
boundless plain with great, carelessly heaped piles of light, soft,
fleecy, snow-white cotton wool, over the eastern edge of which the sun
was just rising into view, while his brilliant, lance-like beams darted
and played over and through the piles of vapour in a glory of prismatic
colour that beggared description. The beauty and glory of the scene
consisted indeed solely in the shimmering and shifting play of every
conceivable shade and tone of richest and purest and most brilliant
colour; and its most charming effect lasted only a brief minute or two,
when the colours gradually became lost in an all-pervading white of
dazzling purity.

"It was lovely, Professor; the most beautiful sight I have ever beheld,"
exclaimed Lady Elphinstone, as she presently turned away from the
ice-cold glass of the scuttle. "What did you think of it, dear?" to
Feodorovna.

"I can only say, with you, dear Lady Elphinstone, that it was the most
beautiful sight I have ever beheld," answered Feodorovna. "It was as
wonderful, too, as it was beautiful, but an even greater wonder, to me,
is the undoubted fact that this huge--ship, I suppose I must call it--is
actually floating in the air at a greater altitude than the clouds
themselves. Although I know it to be the case, from the evidence of my
own senses, my imagination is scarcely powerful enough to realise the
circumstance as a sober fact. And I am lost in wonder, too, at the
magnificence of everything around me. The ship is literally a palace;
and everything is so solid and substantial that, although I know myself
to be hundreds--perhaps thousands--of feet above the earth, I have not a
particle of fear!"

"Fear?" exclaimed the professor, with a laugh. "You would not be
Colonel Sziszkinski's daughter if you were afraid. But in very truth
there is nothing to be afraid of, here; this ship is as safe as any ship
that ever rode the sea; and for precisely the same reason. In the case
of an ocean ship, she will float upon the sea so long as the water is
excluded from her hull; and, in the same way, _this_ ship will float in
the air so long as the air is excluded from her vacuum chambers. The
same natural law applies in bot