"I think we may as well put off dinner, or breakfast as it will be now,
until we see what the world below is like," he said to Zaidie, who was
standing beside him on the conning-tower.
"Oh, never mind about eating just now, this is altogether too wonderful
to be missed for the sake of ordinary meat and drink. Let's go down and
see what there is on the other side."
He sent a message down the speaking tube to Murgatroyd, who was below
among his beloved engines, and the next moment sun and clouds and
ice-peaks had disappeared and nothing was visible save the
all-enveloping silver-grey mist.
For several minutes they remained silent, watching and wondering what
they would find beneath the veil which hid the surface of Venus from
their view. Then the mist thinned out and broke up into patches which
drifted past them as they descended on their downward slanting course.
Below them they saw vast, ghostly shapes of mountains and valleys, lakes
and rivers, continents, islands, and seas. Every moment these became
more and more distinct, and soon they were in full view of the most
marvellous landscape that human eyes had ever beheld. The distances were
tremendous. Mountains, compared with which the Alps or even the Andes
would have seemed mere hillocks, towered up out of the vast depths
beneath them.
Up to the lower edge of the all-covering cloud-sea they were clad with a
golden-yellow vegetation, fields and forests, open, smiling valleys, and
deep, dark ravines through which a thousand torrents thundered down from
the eternal snows beyond, to spread themselves out in rivers and lakes
in the valleys and plains which lay many thousands of feet below.
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