The relative position of the two giants of the Solar System at the
moment when the _Astronef_ left the surface of Ganymede, was such that
she had to make a journey of rather more than 340,000,000 miles before
she passed within the confines of the Saturnine System.
At first her speed, as shown by the observations which Redgrave took
with the instruments which Professor Rennick had designed for the
purpose, was comparatively slow. This was due to the tremendous pull of
Jupiter and its four moons on the fabric of the vessel. The backward
drag rapidly decreased as the pull of Saturn and his system began to
overmaster that of Jupiter.
It so happened, too, that Uranus, the next outer planet of the Solar
System, 1,700,000,000 miles away from the Sun, was approaching its
conjunction with Saturn, and so assisted in producing a constant
acceleration of speed.
Jupiter and his satellites dropped behind, sinking, as it seemed to the
wanderers, down into the bottomless gulf of Space, but still forming by
far the most brilliant and splendid object in the skies. The far-distant
Sun, which, seen from the Saturnian System, has only about a nineteenth
of the superficial extent which it presents to the Earth, dwindled away
rapidly until it began to look like a huge planet, with the Earth,
Venus, Mars, and Mercury as satellites. Beyond the orbit of Saturn,
Uranus, with his eight moons, was shining with the lustre of a star of
the first magnitude, and far above and beyond him again hung the pale
disc of Neptune, the Outer Guard of the Solar System, separated from the
Sun by a gulf of more than 2,750,000,000 miles.
When two-thirds of the distance between Jupiter and Saturn had been
traversed, Ringed Orb lay beneath them like a vast globe surrounded by
an enormous circular ocean of many-coloured fire, divided, as it were,
by circular shores of shade and darkness. On the side opposite to them a
gigantic conical shadow extended beyond the confines of the ocean of
light. It was the shadow of half the globe of Saturn cast by the Sun
across his rings. Three little dark spots were also travelling across
the surface of the rings. They were the shadows of Mimas, Enceladus, and
Tethys, the three inner satellites. Japetus, the most distant, which
revolves at a distance ten times greater than that of the Moon from the
Earth, was rising to their left above the edge of the rings, a pale,
yellow, little disc shining feebly against the black background of
Space. The rest of the eight satellites were hidden behind the enormous
bulk of the planet and the infinitely vaster area of the rings.
Day after day Zaidie and her husband had been exhausting the
possibilities of the English language in attempting to describe to each
other the multiplying marvels of the wondrous scene which they were
approaching at a speed of more than a hundred miles a second, and at
length Zaidie, after nearly an hour's absolute silence, during which
they sat with eyes fastened to their telescopes, looked up and said:
"It's no use, Lenox, all the fine words that we've been trying to think
of have just been wasted. The angels may have a language that you could
describe that in, but we haven't. If it wouldn't be something like
blasphemy I should drop down to the commonplace, and call Saturn a
celestial spinning-top, with bands of light and shadow instead of
colours all round it."
"Not at all a bad simile either," laughed Redgrave, as he got up from
his chair with a yawn and a stretch of his long limbs, "still, it's as
well that you said celestial, for, after all, that's about the best word
we've found yet. Certainly the Ringed World is the most nearly heavenly
thing we've seen so far.
"But," he went on, "I think it's about time we were stopping this
headlong fall of ours. Do you see how the landscape is spreading out
round us? That means that we are dropping pretty fast. Whereabouts would
you like to land? At present we're heading straight for Saturn's north
pole."
"I think I'd rather see what the rings are like first," said Zaidie;
"couldn't we go across them?"
"Certainly we can," he replied, "only we'll have to be a bit careful."
"Careful, what of--collisions? Are you thinking of Proctor's hypothesis
that the rings are formed of multitudes of tiny satellites?"
"Yes, but I should go a little farther than that, I should say that his
rings and his eight satellites are to Saturn what the planets generally
and the ring of the Asteroides are to the Sun, and if that is the
case--I mean if we find the rings made up of myriads of tiny bodies
flying round with Saturn--it might get a bit risky.
"You see the outside ring is a bit over 160,000 miles across, and it
revolves in less than eleven hours. In other words we might find the
ring a sort of celestial maelstrom, and if we once got into the whirl,
and Saturn exerted his full pull on us, we might become a satellite,
too, and go on swinging round with the rest for a good bit of eternity."
"Very well then," she said, "of course we don't want to do anything of
that sort, but there's something else I think we could do," she went on,
taking up a copy of Proctor's "Saturn and its System," which she had
been reading just after breakfast. "You see those rings are, all
together, about 10,000 miles broad; there's a gap of about 1,700 miles
between the big dark one and the middle bright one, and it's nearly
10,000 miles from the edge of the bright ring to the surface of Saturn.
Now why shouldn't we get in between the inner ring and the planet? If
Proctor was right and the rings are made of tiny satellites and there
are myriads of them, of course they'll pull up while Saturn pulls down.
In fact Flammarion says somewhere that along Saturn's equator there is
no weight at all."
"Quite possible," replied Redgrave, "and, if you like, we'll go and
prove it. Of course, if the _Astronef_ weighs absolutely nothing between
Saturn and the rings, we can easily get away. The only thing that I
object to is getting into this 170,000-mile vortex, being whizzed round
with Saturn every ten and a half hours, and sauntering round the Sun at
21,000 miles an hour."
"Don't!" she said. "Really it isn't good to think about these things,
situated as we are. Fancy, in a single year of Saturn there are nearly
25,000 Earth-days. Why, we should each of us be about thirty years older
when we got round, even if we lived, which, of course, we shouldn't. By
the way, how long could we live for, if the worst came to the worst?"
"Given water, about one Earth-year at the outside;" "but, of course, we
shall be home long before that."
"If we don't become one of the satellites of Saturn," she replied, "or
get dragged away by something into the outer depths of Space."
Meanwhile the downward speed of the _Astronef_ had been considerably
checked. The vast circle of the rings seemed to suddenly expand, and
soon it covered the whole floor of the Vault of Space.
As she dropped towards what might be called the limit of the northern
tropic of Saturn, the spectacle presented by the rings became every
minute more and more marvellous--purple and silver, black and gold,
dotted with myriads of brilliant points of many-coloured light, they
stretched upwards like vast rainbows into the Saturnian sky as the
_Astronef's_ position changed with regard to the horizon of the planet.
The nearer they approached the surface, the nearer the gigantic arch of
the many-coloured rings approached the zenith. Sun and stars sank down
behind it, for now they were dropping through the fifteen-year-long
twilight that reigns over that portion of the globe of Saturn which,
during half of his year of thirty terrestrial years, is turned away from
the Sun.
The further they fell towards the rings the more certain it became that
the theory of the great English astronomer was the correct one. Seen
through the telescopes at a distance of only thirty or forty thousand
miles, it became perfectly plain that the outer or darker ring as seen
from the Earth was composed of myriads of tiny bodies so far separated
from each other that the rayless blackness of Space could be seen
through them.
"It's quite evident," said Redgrave, after a long look through his
telescope, "that those are rings of what we should call meteorites on
Earth, atoms of matter which Saturn threw off into Space after the
satellites were formed."
"And I shouldn't wonder, if you will excuse my interrupting you," said
Zaidie, "if the moons themselves have been made up of a lot of these
things going together when they were only gas, or nebula, or something
of that sort. In fact, when Saturn was a good deal younger than he is
now, he may have had a lot more rings and no moons, and now these
aerolites, or whatever they are, can't come together and make moons,
because they've got too solid."
Meanwhile the _Astronef_ was rapidly approaching that portion of
Saturn's surface which was illuminated by the rays of the Sun, streaming
under the lower arch of the inner ring.
As they passed under it the whole scene suddenly changed. The rings
vanished. Overhead was an arch of brilliant light a hundred miles thick,
spanning the whole of the visible heavens. Below lay the sunlit surface
of Saturn divided into light and dark bands of enormous breadth.
The band immediately below them was of a brilliant silver-grey, very
much like the central zone of Jupiter. North of this on the one side
stretched the long shadow of the rings, and southward other bands of
alternating white and gold and deep purple succeeded each other till
they were lost in the curvature of the vast planet. The poles were of
course invisible since the _Astronef_ was now too near the surface; but
on their approach they had seen unmistakable evidence of snow and ice.
As soon as they were exactly under the Ring-arch, Redgrave shut off the
R. Force, and, somewhat to their astonishment, the _Astronef_ began to
revolve slowly on its axis, giving them the idea that the Saturnian
System was revolving round them. The arch seemed to sink beneath their
feet while the belts of the planet rose above them.
"What on earth is the matter?" said Zaidie. "Everything has gone upside
down."
"Which shows," replied Redgrave, "that as soon as the _Astronef_ became
neutral the rings pulled harder than the planet, I suppose because we're
so near to them, and, instead of falling on to Saturn, we shall have to
push up at him."
"Oh yes, I see that," said Zaidie, "but after all it does look a little
bit bewildering, doesn't it, to be on your feet one minute and on your
head the next?"
"It is, rather; but you ought to be getting accustomed to that sort of
thing now. In a few minutes neither you, nor I, nor anything else will
have any weight. We shall be just between the attraction of the rings
and Saturn, so you'd better go and sit down, for if you were to give a
bit of an extra spring in walking you might be knocking that pretty head
of yours against the roof," said Redgrave, as he went to turn the R.
Force on to the edge of the rings.
A vast sea of silver cloud seemed now to descend upon them. Then they
entered it, and for nearly half an hour the _Astronef_ was totally
enveloped in a sea of pearl-grey luminous mist.
"Atmosphere!" said Redgrave, as he went to the conning-tower and
signalled to Murgatroyd to start the propellers. They continued to rise
and the mist began to drift past them in patches, showing that the
propellers were driving them ahead.
They now rose swiftly towards the surface of the planet. The cloud-wrack
got thinner and thinner, and presently they found themselves floating in
a clear atmosphere between two seas of cloud, the one above them being
much less dense than the one below.
"I believe we shall see Saturn on the other side of that," said Zaidie,
looking up at it. "Oh dear, there we are going round again."
"Reaching the point of neutral attraction," said Redgrave; "once more
you'd better sit down in case of accidents."
Instead of dropping into her deck-chair as she would have done on Earth,
she took hold of the arms and pulled herself into it, saying:
"Really, it seems rather absurd to have to do this sort of thing. Fancy
having to hold yourself into a chair. I suppose I hardly weigh anything
at all now."
"Not much," said Redgrave, stooping down and taking hold of the end of
the chair with both hands. Without any apparent effort he raised her
about five feet from the floor, and held her there while the _Astronef_
made another revolution. For a moment he let go, and she and the chair
floated between the roof and the floor of the deck-chamber. Then he
pulled the chair away from under her, and as the floor of the vessel
once more turned towards Saturn, he took hold of her hands and brought
her to her feet on deck again.
[Illustration: _Without any apparent effort he raised her about five
feet from the floor._]
"I ought to have had a photograph of you like that!" he laughed. "I
wonder what they'd think of it at home?"
"If you had taken one I should certainly have broken the negative. The
very idea--a photograph of me standing on nothing! Besides, they'd never
believe it on Earth."
"We might have got old Andrew to make an affidavit as to the true
circumstances," he began.
"Don't talk nonsense, Lenox! Look! there's something much more
interesting. There's Saturn at last. Now I wonder if we shall find any
sort of life there--and shall we be able to breathe the air?"
"I hardly think so," he said, as the _Astronef_ dropped slowly through
the thin cloud-veil. "You know spectrum analysis has proved that there
is a gas in Saturn's atmosphere which we know nothing about, and,
however good it may be for the Saturnians, it's not very likely that it
would agree with us, so I think we'd better be content with our own.
Besides, the atmosphere is so enormously dense that even if we could
breathe it it might squash us up. You see we're only accustomed to
fifteen pounds on the square inch, and it may be hundreds of pounds
here."
"Well," said Zaidie, "I haven't got any particular desire to be
flattened out, or squeezed dry like an orange. It's not at all a nice
idea, is it? But look, Lenox," she went on, pointing downwards, "surely
this isn't air at all, or at least it's something between air and water.
Aren't those things swimming about in it--something like fish in the
sea? They can't be clouds, and they aren't either fish or birds. They
don't fly or float. Well, this is certainly more wonderful than anything
else we've seen, though it doesn't look very pleasant. They're not
nice-looking, are they? I wonder if they are at all dangerous!"
While she was saying this Zaidie had gone to her telescope, and was
sweeping the surface of Saturn, which was now about a hundred miles
distant. Her husband was doing the same. In fact, for the time being
they were all eyes, for they were looking on a stranger sight than man
or woman had ever seen before.
Underneath the inner cloud-veil the atmosphere of Saturn appeared to
them somewhat as the lower depths of the ocean would appear to a diver,
granted that he was able to see for hundreds of miles about him. Its
colour was a pale greenish yellow. The outside thermometers showed that
the temperature was a hundred and seventy-five Fahrenheit. In fact, the
interior of the _Astronef_ was getting uncomfortably like a Turkish
bath, and Redgrave took the opportunity of at once freshening and
cooling the air by releasing a little oxygen from the cylinders.
From what they could see of the surface of Saturn it seemed to be a dead
level, greyish brown in colour, and not divided into oceans and
continents. In fact there were no signs whatever of water within range
of their telescopes. There was nothing that looked like cities, or any
human habitations, but the ground, as they got nearer to it, seemed to
be covered with a very dense vegetable growth, not unlike gigantic forms
of seaweed, and of somewhat the same colour. In fact, as Zaidie
remarked, the surface of Saturn was not at all unlike what the floors of
the ocean of the Earth might be if they were laid bare.
It was evident that the life of this portion of Saturn was not what, for
want of a more exact word, might be called terrestrial. Its inhabitants,
however they were constituted, floated about in the depths of this
semi-gaseous ocean as the denizens of earthly seas did in the
terrestrial oceans. Already their telescopes enabled them to make out
enormous moving shapes, black and grey-brown and pale red, swimming
about, evidently by their own volition, rising and falling and often
sinking down on to the gigantic vegetation which covered the surface,
possibly for the purpose of feeding. But it was also evident that they
resembled the inhabitants of earthly oceans in another respect, since it
was easy to see that they preyed upon each other.
"I don't like the look of those creatures at all," said Zaidie, when the
_Astronef_ had come to a stop and was floating about ten miles above the
surface. "They're altogether too uncanny. They look to me something like
jelly-fish about the size of whales, only they have eyes and mouths. Did
you ever see such awful-looking eyes, bigger than soup-plates and as
bright as a cat's. I suppose that's because of the dim light. And the
nasty wormy sort of way they swim, or fly, or whatever it is. Lenox, I
don't know what the rest of Saturn may be like, but I certainly don't
like this part. It's quite too creepy and unearthly for my taste. Look
at the horrors fighting and eating each other. That's the only bit of
earthly character they've got about them; the big ones eating the little
ones. I hope they won't take the _Astronef_ for something nice to eat."
"They'd find her a pretty tough morsel if they did," laughed Redgrave,
"but still we may as well get some steering way on her in case of
accident."