an others had
done, for the discussion as to the possibilities of Venus was continued
in a quite delightful mixture of scientific disquisition and that
converse which is common to most human beings on their honeymoon.

As there was nothing more to be done or seen for an hour or two, the
afternoon was spent in a pleasant siesta in the luxurious deck-saloon;
because evening to them would be morning on that portion of Venus to
which they were directing their course, and, as Zaidie said, when she
subsided into her hammock:

It would be breakfast-time before they could get dinner.

As the _Astronef_ fell with ever-increasing velocity towards the
cloud-covered surface of Venus, the remainder of her disc, lit up by the
radiance of her sister-worlds, Mercury, Mars, and the Earth, and also by
the pale radiance of an enormous comet, which had suddenly shot into
view from behind its southern limb, became more or less visible.

Towards six o'clock it became necessary to exert nearly the whole
strength of her engines to check the velocity of her fall. By eight she
had entered the atmosphere of Venus, and was dropping slowly towards a
vast sea of sunlit cloud, out of which, on all sides, towered thousands
of snow-clad peaks, rounded summits, and widespread stretches of upland
about which the clouds swept and surged like the silent billows of some
vast ocean in Ghostland.

"I thought so!" said Redgrave, when the propellers had begun to revolve
and Murgatroyd had taken his place in the conning-tower. "A very dense
atmosphere loaded with clouds. There's the Sun just rising, so your
ladyship's wishes are duly obeyed."

"And doesn't it seem nice and homelike to see him rising through an
atmosphere above the clouds again? It doesn't look a bit like the same
sort of dear old Sun just blazing like a red-hot Moon among a lot of
white-hot stars and planets. Look, aren't those peaks lovely, and that
cloud-sea?--why, for all the world we might be in a balloon above the
Rockies or the Alps. And see," she continued, pointing to one of the
thermometers fixed outside the glass dome which covered the upper deck,
"it's only sixty-five even here. I wonder if we can breathe this air,
and--oh--I do wonder what we shall see on the other side of those
clouds."

"You shall have both questions answered in a few minutes," replied
Redgrave, going towards the conning-tower. "To begin with, I think we'll
land on that big snow-dome yonder, and do a little