The only thing that I
object to is getting into this 170,000-mile vortex, being whizzed round
with Saturn every ten and a half hours, and sauntering round the Sun at
21,000 miles an hour."
"Don't!" she said. "Really it isn't good to think about these things,
situated as we are. Fancy, in a single year of Saturn there are nearly
25,000 Earth-days. Why, we should each of us be about thirty years older
when we got round, even if we lived, which, of course, we shouldn't. By
the way, how long could we live for, if the worst came to the worst?"
"Given water, about one Earth-year at the outside;" "but, of course, we
shall be home long before that."
"If we don't become one of the satellites of Saturn," she replied, "or
get dragged away by something into the outer depths of Space."
Meanwhile the downward speed of the _Astronef_ had been considerably
checked. The vast circle of the rings seemed to suddenly expand, and
soon it covered the whole floor of the Vault of Space.
As she dropped towards what might be called the limit of the northern
tropic of Saturn, the spectacle presented by the rings became every
minute more and more marvellous--purple and silver, black and gold,
dotted with myriads of brilliant points of many-coloured light, they
stretched upwards like vast rainbows into the Saturnian sky as the
_Astronef's_ position changed with regard to the horizon of the planet.
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