By five o'clock it would be a hemisphere, and by five
minutes to ten the vast sphere would be once more shining full-orbed
upon them. By eight o'clock next morning they would find Jupiter "new"
again.
They were now falling very rapidly towards the huge planet, and, since
there is no up or down in Space, the nearer they got to it the more it
appeared to sink below them and become, as it were, the floor of the
Celestial Sphere. As the crescent approached the full they were able to
examine the mysterious bands as human observers had never examined them
before. For hours they sat almost silent at their telescopes, trying to
probe the mystery which has baffled human science since the days of
Galileo, and gradually it became plain that Redgrave was correct in the
hypothesis which he had derived from Flammarion and one or two others of
the more advanced astronomers.
"I believe I was right, or, in other words, those that I got the idea
from are," he said, as they approached the orbit of Calisto, which
revolves at a distance of about eleven hundred thousand miles from the
surface of Jupiter.
"Those belts are made of clouds or vapour in some stage or other. The
highest--the ones along the Equator and what we should call the
Temperate Zones--are the highest, and therefore coolest and whitest. The
dark ones are the lowest and hottest.
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