t--to the very great regret of the
inhabitants, who found that every little service rendered to the white
strangers was munificently rewarded by a present of beads, buttons,
party-coloured cloth, or perhaps a small hand mirror--the travellers
made the best of their way to Bombay, at which place Mrs Scott and her
nieces were anxious to be landed, and there they bade their fair guests
a reluctant adieu. Thence, starting under cover of night and rising to
a height of about ten thousand feet above the ground surface, the
travellers made their way across the Indian peninsula in a north-
easterly direction, travelling at a speed of about one hundred miles per
hour, and arriving about eight o'clock the next morning at the foot of
Mount Everest, the summit of which--towering into the sky to the
enormous altitude of twenty-nine thousand feet above the sea-level, and
believed to be the most lofty spot of earth on the surface of our
globe--they intended attempting to reach.

Here, on a magnificent grassy plateau surrounded by trees, and with not
a single sign of human life at hand, the _Flying Fish_ was brought to
earth and temporarily secured whilst the party took breakfast.

"Now," said the professor as they rose from the breakfast-table, "in
seeking to plant our feet upon the topmost peak of Mount Everest we are
about to enter upon a task of no ordinary difficulty and danger, and it
is desirable that no avoidable risks should be run. The danger arises
from two causes--the excessive cold, and the highly rarefied state of
the atmosphere at so enormous an elevation. The first can be guarded
against by suitable clothing; the second can only be overcome by the
assumption of our diving dresses. The latter, no doubt, seems to you a
strange precaution; but it is a fact, that on the top of Mount Everest
the air is too thin to support life, at all events in comfort, and for
any but the briefest possible time; so we must take up our air with us.
Let us therefore go and make these necessary changes of costume before
we attempt moving the ship from her present position."

Half an hour later, the party, accoutred in their diving armour--between
which and their ordinary clothing they had interposed stout warm flannel
overalls--and armed with small ice-hatchets, mustered in the pilot-
house; the ship was released from the ground, a vacuum created in her
air-chambers, and upward she at once shot into the clear blue cloudless
sky. A few m