Every now and then during the voyage across the temperate zone the
propellers were slowed down to enable them to witness some Titanic
conflict between the gigantic denizens of land and sea and air. But
Zaidie had had enough of horrors on the Saturnian equator, and so she
was content to watch this phase of evolution working itself out (as it
had done on the Earth thousands of ages ago) from a convenient distance.
Wherefore the _Astronef_ sped on without approaching the surface nearer
than was necessary to get a clear general view.
"It'll be all very nice to see and remember and dream about afterwards,"
she said, "but I don't think I can stand any more monsters just now, at
least not at close quarters, and I'm quite sure that if those things can
live there we couldn't, any more than we could have lived on Earth a
million years or so ago. No, really I don't want to land, Lenox; let's
go on."
They went on at a speed of about a hundred miles an hour, and, as they
progressed southward, both the atmosphere and the landscape rapidly
changed. The air grew clearer and the clouds lighter. Land and sea were
more sharply divided, and both teeming with life. The seas still swarmed
with serpentine monsters of the saurian type, and the firmer lands were
peopled by huge animals, mastodons, bears, giant tapirs, mylodons,
deinotheriums, and a score of other species too strange for them to
recognise by any Earthly likeness, which roamed in great herds through
the vast twilit forests and over boundless plains covered with grey-blue
vegetation.
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