"
"Amen, Andrew, that's well said," replied Redgrave, and then he went
back to the saloon and Murgatroyd went on with his oiling.
When he told her ladyship of his discovery she just looked up from the
table she was laying and said:
"Oh, indeed! Well, I'm very glad that it's five or six hundred million
miles from the Earth. A dead world bigger than the Moon, and made of
gold and silver sponge, wouldn't be a nice thing to have too near the
Earth. There's trouble enough about that sort of thing at home as it is.
Still, it'll be a nice addition to the museum, and if you'll put it away
and go and wash your hands lunch will be ready."
When they got back to the deck-chamber Calisto was already a half moon
in the upper sky nearly five hundred thousand miles away, and the full
orb of Ganymede, shining with a pale golden light, lay outspread beneath
them. A thin, bluish-grey arc of the giant planet overarched its western
edge.
"I think we shall find something like a world here," said her ladyship,
when she had taken her first look through her telescope; "there's an
atmosphere and what look like thin clouds. Continents and oceans too, or
something like them, and what is that light shining up between the
breaks? Isn't it something like our Aurora?"
"It might be," replied Redgrave, turning his own telescope towards the
northern pole of Ganymede, "though I never heard of a satellite having
an aurora.
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