At first her speed, as shown by the observations which Redgrave took
with the instruments which Professor Rennick had designed for the
purpose, was comparatively slow. This was due to the tremendous pull of
Jupiter and its four moons on the fabric of the vessel. The backward
drag rapidly decreased as the pull of Saturn and his system began to
overmaster that of Jupiter.
It so happened, too, that Uranus, the next outer planet of the Solar
System, 1,700,000,000 miles away from the Sun, was approaching its
conjunction with Saturn, and so assisted in producing a constant
acceleration of speed.
Jupiter and his satellites dropped behind, sinking, as it seemed to the
wanderers, down into the bottomless gulf of Space, but still forming by
far the most brilliant and splendid object in the skies. The far-distant
Sun, which, seen from the Saturnian System, has only about a nineteenth
of the superficial extent which it presents to the Earth, dwindled away
rapidly until it began to look like a huge planet, with the Earth,
Venus, Mars, and Mercury as satellites. Beyond the orbit of Saturn,
Uranus, with his eight moons, was shining with the lustre of a star of
the first magnitude, and far above and beyond him again hung the pale
disc of Neptune, the Outer Guard of the Solar System, separated from the
Sun by a gulf of more than 2,750,000,000 miles.
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