e Andes call us for breakfast. When the
Pacific Ocean has passed from view, Japan and Australia shall strike
noon for us, and we will have supper and call it night when the Indian
Ocean is gone and darkest Africa has come into view!"

CHAPTER XII

Space Fever

We counted seven successive returns of the peaks of the Andes, and being
by that time certainly six million miles from the Earth, we could
distinguish them no longer. Then followed what I remember as a very long
and unspeakably monotonous period, without any adequate method of
marking the time. Our days became a full week long, for the only way we
could guess at the time was by the quarterings of the Moon. We could
still see her about the size of a marble in the telescope, and as her
crescent began to wane, and finally her light entirely disappeared, we
knew she was then just between us and the Earth, and shining upon that
planet as a Full Moon. This was due to occur fifteen days after our
departure. Then we watched her grow from a thin crescent to a bright
quarter, and we knew another week had elapsed.

"We shall soon be able to determine one date with absolute certainty," I
said to the doctor, when we must have been some twenty days out. "I have
been reading up your almanack, and I find there is a total eclipse of
the Sun by the Moon on June 29th."

"You might as well try to eclipse him with a straw-hat, as far as we are
concerned," he replied. "The Moon will necessarily be on the further
side of the Earth when that occurs, and the eclipse will barely reach
the Earth. It will fall short of us by a matter of some thirty million
miles!"

It was soon after this that we gave up observing the Earth as a planet,
put on our darkened lens, and proceeded to hold her as a spot in the Sun
a little to the left of his centre. The Moon remained a tiny spot of
light outside for a few days; but finally she entered the Sun also, and
was seen as a faint spot travelling toward the Earth-spot.

Although the dazzling quality of the light, into which we had emerged
after the second day, was finally beginning to wane and pale a little,
Mars was still invisible. In fact, no stars or planets were visible;
only the gleaming Sun with the Earth-spot upon it. Our thermometer was
poorly placed in the glare of the Sun at the rear; but it showed the
heat was decreasing, and from a temperature of thirty-five degrees,
observed at the end of the second day, it had now fallen to tw