“Hush!  What art thou?  Be humble and revere.”

After a while, I perceived a pure celestial radiance of a marvellous whiteness dawning in the east.  By slow degrees it spread over the starlit sky, lightening its blackness to a deep Prussian blue, and lining the sable clouds on the horizon with silver.  At length the round disc of the sun, whiter than the full moon, and intolerably bright, rose into view.

With the intention of rejoining Professor Gazen in the observatory, and seeing it through his telescope, I flung away my cigar, and stepped towards the door of the cabin; but ere I had gone two paces, I suddenly reeled and fell.  At first I imagined that an accident had happened to the car, but soon realised that I myself was at fault.  Dizzy and faint, with a bounding pulse, an aching head, and a panting chest, I raised myself with great difficulty into a seat, and tried to collect my thoughts.  For the last quarter of an hour I had been aware of a growing uneasiness, but the spectacle of sunrise had entranced me, and I forgot it.  Suspecting an attack of “mountain sickness” owing to the rarity of the atmosphere, I attempted to rise and close the scuttles, but found that I had lost all power in my lower limbs.  The pain in my head increased, the palpitation of my heart grew more violent, my ears rang like a bell, and I literally gasped for breath.  Moreover, I felt a peculiar dryness in my throat, and a disagreeable taste of blood in my mouth.  What was to be done?  I tried again to reach the door, but only to find that I could not even move my arms, let alone my feet.  Nevertheless, I was singularly free from agitation or alarm, and my mind was just as clear as it is now.  I reflected that as the car was ever rising into a rarer atmosphere, my only hope of salvation lay in calling for help, and that as the paralysis was gaining on my whole body, not a moment was to be lost.  I shouted with all my strength; but beyond a sort of hiss, not a sound escaped my lips.  The profound silence of the car now struck me in a new light.  Had Gazen and Miss Carmichael not committed the same blunder, and suffered a like fate?  Perhaps even Carmichael himself had been equally careless, and the flying machine, now masterless, was carrying us Heaven knows whither.  Strange to say I entertained these sinister apprehensions without the least emotion.  I had lost all feeling of pain or anxiety, and was perfectly tranquil and indifferent to anything that might happen.  It is possible that with the paralysis of my powers to help myself, I was also relieved by nature from the fears of death.  I began to think of the sensation which our mysterious disappearance would make in the newspapers, and of divers other matters, such as my own boyhood and my friends, when all at once my eyes grew dim—­and I remembered nothing more.

CHAPTER VII.

ARRIVING IN VENUS.

“Try to speak—­there’s a good fellow—­open your eyes.”