TURN

Turn back now for a moment to the plan of the Solar System.

We had to cross 775 million kilometers (480,000,000 miles) when we left
the Sun, in order to reach the immense orb of Jupiter, which courses in
space at 626 million kilometers (388,000,000 miles) from the terrestrial
orbit. From Jupiter we had to traverse a distance of 646 million
kilometers (400,000,000 miles) in order to reach the marvelous system of
Saturn, where our eyes and thoughts must next alight.

Son of Uranus and Vesta, Saturn was the God of Time and Fate. He is
generally represented as an aged man bearing a scythe. His mythological
character is only the expression of his celestial aspect, as we have
seen for the brilliant Jupiter, for the pale Venus, the ruddy Mars, and
the agile Mercury. The revolution of Saturn is the slowest of any among
the planets known to the ancients. It takes almost thirty years for its
accomplishment, and at that distance the Saturnian world, though it
still shines with the brilliancy of a star of the first magnitude,
exhibits to our eyes a pale and leaden hue. Here is, indeed, the god of
Time, with slow and almost funereal gait.

Poor Saturn won no favor with the poets and astrologers. He bore the
horrid reputation of being the inexhaustible source of misfortune and
evil fates,--whereof he is wholly innocent, troubling himself not at all
with our world nor its inhabitants.

This world travels in the vastness of the Heavens at a distance of 1,421
million kilometers (881,000,000 miles) from the Sun. Hence it is ten
times farther from the orb of day than the Earth, though still
illuminated and governed by the Sun-God. Its gigantic orbit is ten times
larger than our own.

Its revolution round the Sun is accomplished in 10,759 days, _i.e._, 29
years, 167 days, and as this strange planet rotates upon itself with
great rapidity in 10 hours, 15 minutes, its year comprises no less than
25,217 days. What a calendar! The Saturnians must needs have a
prodigious memory not to get hopelessly involved in this interminable
number of days. A curious world, where each year stands for almost
thirty of our own, and where the day is more than half as short again as
ours. But we shall presently find other and more extraordinary
differences on this planet.

In the first place it is nearly nine and a half times larger than our
world. It is a globe, not spherical, but spheroidal, and the flattening
of its poles, which is one-tenth,