The nearer they approached the surface, the nearer the gigantic arch of
the many-coloured rings approached the zenith. Sun and stars sank down
behind it, for now they were dropping through the fifteen-year-long
twilight that reigns over that portion of the globe of Saturn which,
during half of his year of thirty terrestrial years, is turned away from
the Sun.
The further they fell towards the rings the more certain it became that
the theory of the great English astronomer was the correct one. Seen
through the telescopes at a distance of only thirty or forty thousand
miles, it became perfectly plain that the outer or darker ring as seen
from the Earth was composed of myriads of tiny bodies so far separated
from each other that the rayless blackness of Space could be seen
through them.
"It's quite evident," said Redgrave, after a long look through his
telescope, "that those are rings of what we should call meteorites on
Earth, atoms of matter which Saturn threw off into Space after the
satellites were formed."
"And I shouldn't wonder, if you will excuse my interrupting you," said
Zaidie, "if the moons themselves have been made up of a lot of these
things going together when they were only gas, or nebula, or something
of that sort. In fact, when Saturn was a good deal younger than he is
now, he may have had a lot more rings and no moons, and now these
aerolites, or whatever they are, can't come together and make moons,
because they've got too solid.
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