"
Zaidie got her apparatus to work, and when she had taken her slides down
to the dark-room, Redgrave turned the R. Force on very slightly and
Phobos began to sink away beneath them. The attraction of Mars now began
to make itself strongly felt, and the _Astronef_ dropped rapidly through
the eight thousand miles which separate the inner and outer satellites.
As they approached Phobos they saw that half the little disc was
brilliantly lighted by the same rays of the sun which were glowing on
the rapidly increasing crescent of Mars beneath them. By careful
manipulation of his engines Redgrave managed to meet the approaching
satellite with a hardly perceptible shock about the centre of its
lighted portion, that is to say the side turned towards the planet.
Mars now appeared as a gigantic rosy moon filling the whole vault of the
heavens above them. Their telescopes brought the three thousand seven
hundred and fifty miles down to about ten. The rapid motion of the tiny
satellite afforded them a spectacle which might be compared to the
rising of a moon glowing with rosy light and hundreds of times larger
than the earth. The speed of the vehicle of which they had taken
possession, something like four thousand two hundred miles an hour,
caused the surface of the planet to apparently sweep away from below
them, just as the earth seems to glide from under the car of a balloon.
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