had my nap. I am too
sleepy now;" and he finished with a yawn.

He soon fell asleep, and I was left alone to think over the events of
the day and the still more strange happenings of the night. It hurt my
eyes to look long through the telescope, so I closed them and gave free
rein to my thoughts.

How soon will it be morning? How shall I know when it _is_ morning? That
term "morning" applies only to the surface of revolving planets. I had
just seen the morning come at midnight, and then the darkness of night
fall again directly after morning. After all, what are night and
morning? The one is a passing into the shadow of the Earth, and the
other is simply the emerging into the light. They depend on a rotation,
and we shall know no more of them until we land on a revolving planet
again. But which shall we have on the trip, night or daylight? Naturally
we would very soon emerge from the little shadow cast by the Earth. It
had taken us but an hour or two to travel out of it into the daylight
and then back into the darkness again. Even if we did not leave it, the
Earth would move on and leave us.

And what then? Nothing but uninterrupted, untempered, unhindered
daylight! Eternal, dazzling, direct sunlight, unrelieved by any night,
unstrained through any clouds! This deep blue of the starry night would
be succeeded by the hot, white light of a scorching, gleaming Sun. And
then (the thought chilled my bones as it fell upon me!), then how would
we see Mars? How would we see any star, or perchance the Moon? Even the
Earth might be drowned in that sea of everlasting, all-engulfing
brilliancy! Nothing in all the Universe would be visible but the beaming
Sun, and he too blindingly bright to look upon.

As the truth of all this took hold of me, it filled me with a growing
terror. At any moment we might emerge from this grateful shadow of the
Earth, and then we would be lost, drowned, engulfed in a blinding,
sight-suffocating light! In desperate terror I looked around toward the
doctor, as if for assistance. He was sleeping peacefully. He had never
thought of it! _This_ was the great thing he had overlooked! Even at
starting he had a dreadful presentiment of it.

He was a great man, and his discovery a wonderful one; but here was the
trouble with it. He had solved the question of navigating space, but the
sunlight! the dazzling, burning, terrible sunlight! how was he to
navigate that? It was simply impossible! We would have to