The rivers and lakes and seas which spread out beneath them, seemed
never to have been ruffled by blast of storm or breath of wind, and
their surfaces shone with a soft, silvery light, which seemed to come
from below rather than from above.
"If this isn't heaven it must be the half-way house," said Redgrave,
with what was, perhaps, under the circumstances, a pardonable
irreverence. "Still, after all, we don't know what the inhabitants may
be like, so I think we'd better close the doors, and drop on the top of
that mountain-spur running out between the two rivers into the bay. Do
you notice how curious the water looks after the Earth seas; bright
silver, instead of blue and green?"
"Oh, it's just lovely," said Zaidie. "Let's go down and have a walk.
There's nothing to be afraid of. You'll never make me believe that a
world like this can be inhabited by anything dangerous."
"Perhaps, but we mustn't forget what happened on Mars, _Madonna mia_.
Still, there's one thing, we haven't been tackled by any aerial fleets
yet."
"I don't think the people here want air-ships. They can fly themselves.
Look! there are a lot of them coming to meet us. That was a rather
wicked remark of yours, Lenox, about the half-way house to heaven; but
those certainly do look something like angels."
As Zaidie said this, after a somewhat lengthy pause, during which the
_Astronef_ had descended to within a few hundred feet of the
mountain-spur, she handed her field-glasses to her husband, and pointed
downwards towards an island which lay a couple or miles or so off the
end of the spur.
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