I heard the words as in a dream.  I recognised the voice of Gazen, but it seemed to come from the far distance.  Opening my eyes I found myself prostrate on the floor of the smoking room, with the professor and Miss Carmichael kneeling beside me.  There was a look of great anxiety on their faces.

“I’m all right,” said I feebly.  “I’m so glad you are safe.”

It appears that a short time before, Gazen had closed the scuttles of the observatory and returned with Miss Carmichael to the saloon, then, after calling to me without receiving any answer, had opened the door of the smoking-room and seen me lying in a dead faint.  Luckily Miss Carmichael had acquired some knowledge of medicine, partly from her father, and without loss of time they applied themselves to bring me round by the method of artificial respiration employed in cases of drowning or lightning stroke.

It would be tedious to narrate all the particulars of our journey through the dark abyss, particularly as nothing very important befell us, and one day passed like another.  Now and then a small meteoric stone struck the car and glanced off its rounded sides.

“Old Charon,” as Gazen and I had nicknamed Carmichael, after the grim ferryman of the Styx, seldom forsook his engines, and Miss Carmichael spent a good deal of her time along with him.  Occasionally she chatted with Gazen and myself in the saloon, or helped us to make scientific observations; but although neither of us openly confessed it, I think we both felt that she did not give us quite enough of her company.  Her manner seemed to betray no preference for one or the other.

Did she, by her feminine instinct, perceive that we were both solicitous of her company, and was she afraid of exciting jealousy between us?  In any case we were all the more glad to see her when she did join us.  No doubt men in general, and professors in particular, are fond of communicating knowledge, but a great deal depends on the pupil; and certainly I was surprised to see how the hard and dry astronomer beamed with delight as he initiated this young lady into the mysteries of the apparatus, and what a deal of trouble he took to cram her lovely head with mathematics.

We noted the temperature of space as we darted onwards, and discovered that it contains a trace of gases lost from the atmospheres of the heavenly bodies.  We also found there a sprinkling of minute organisms, which had probably strayed from some living world.  Gazen suggested that these might sow the seeds of organic life in brand-new planets, ready for them, but perhaps that was only his scientific joke.  The jokes of science are frequently so well disguised, that many people take them for earnest.

Gazen made numerous observations of the celestial bodies, more especially the sun, which now appeared as a globe of lilac fire in the centre of a silvery lustre, but I will leave him to publish his results in his own fashion.  We may claim to have seen the South Pole, but, of course, at a distance too great for scientific purposes.  Judging by its appearance, I should say it was surrounded by a frozen land.  The earth, with its ruddy and green continents, delineated as on a map, or veiled in belted clouds, was a magnificent object for the telescope as it wheeled in the blue rays of the sun.