"
"If I'm afraid at all it's only because you are with me, Zaidie," he
replied, "but I've only got a fourth of the power turned on yet, so
there's plenty of margin."
The _Astronef_, therefore, continued to sink through what seemed to be a
fathomless ocean of whirling, blazing clouds, and the internal
temperature went on rising slowly but steadily. Their guests, without
showing the slightest sign of any emotion, walked about the upper deck
now, singly and now together, apparently absorbed by the strange scene
about them.
At length, after they had been dropping for some five hours by
_Astronef_ time, one of them, uttering a sharp exclamation, pointed to
an enormous rift about fifty miles away. A dull, red glare was streaming
up out of it. The next moment the brown cloud-floor beneath them seemed
to split up into enormous wreaths of vapour, which whirled up on all
sides of them, and a few minutes later they caught their first glimpse
of the true surface of Jupiter.
It lay, as nearly as they could judge, some two thousand miles beneath
them, a distance which the telescopes reduced to less than twenty; and
they saw for a few moments the world that was in the making. Through
floating seas of misty steam they beheld what seemed to them to be vast
continents shape themselves and melt away into oceans of flames.
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