ad not fully estimated before even preparing for my voyage.
If I should fail to come near enough to the goal of my journey, and
yet should go on into space, or if, on the other hand, I should stop
short, the Astronaut might become an independent planet, pursuing an
orbit nearly parallel to that of the Earth; in which case I should
perish of starvation. It was conceivable that I might, in attempting
to avert this fate, fall upon the Sun, though this seemed exceedingly
improbable, requiring a combination of accidents very unlikely to
occur. On the other hand, I might by possibility attain my point, and
yet, failing properly to calculate the rate of descent, be dashed to
pieces upon the surface of Mars. Of this, however, I had very little
fear, the tremendous power of the apergy having been so fully proved
that I believed that nothing but some disabling accident to
myself--such as was hardly to be feared in the absence of gravitation,
and with the extreme simplicity of the machinery I employed--could
prevent my being able, when I became aware of the danger, to employ in
time a sufficient force to avert it. The first of these perils, then,
was the graver one, perhaps the only grave one, and certainly to my
imagination it was much the most terrible. The idea of perishing of
want in the infinite solitude of space, and being whirled round for
ever the dead denizen of a planet one hundred feet in diameter, had in
it something even more awful than grotesque.

On the thirty-ninth morning of my voyage, so far as I could calculate
by the respective direction and size of the Sun and of Mars, I was
within about 1,900,000 miles from the latter. I proceeded without
hesitation to direct the whole force of the current permitted to
emerge from the apergion directly against the centre of the planet.
His diameter increased with great rapidity, till at the end of the
first day I found myself within one million of miles of his surface.
His diameter subtended about 15', and his disc appeared about
one-fourth the size of the Moon. Examined through the telescope, it
presented a very different appearance from that either of the Earth or
of her satellite. It resembled the former in having unmistakably air
and water. But, unlike the Earth, the greater portion of its surface
seemed to be land; and, instead of continents surrounded by water, it
presented a number of separate seas, nearly all of them land-locked.
Around the snow-cap of each pole was a