Hour after hour, with a kind of loving fascination, we watched it growing “fine by degrees and beautifully less,” until at last it waned into a bright star.

Venus, on the other hand, waxed more and more brilliant until it rivalled the moon, and Mercury appeared as a rosy star not far from it.

We soon got accustomed to the funereal aspect of the sky, and the utter silence of space.  Indeed, I was not so much impressed by the reality as I had been by the simulacrum in my dream of sunrise in the moon.  When I looked at the weird radiance of the sun, however, I realised as I had never done before that he was only a star seen comparatively near, and that the earth was but his insignificant satellite.  Moreover, when I gazed down into the yawning gulf, with its strange constellations so far beneath us, I felt to the full the awful loneliness of the universe; and how that all life and soul were confined to mere sunlit specks thinly scattered here and there in the blackness of eternal night.

Steering a calculated course by the stars, we reached the orbit of Venus, and travelled along it in advance of the planet with a velocity rather less than her own, so as to allow her to overtake us.  Some notion of the eagerness with which we scanned her approach may be gathered by imagining the moon to fall towards the earth.  Slowly and steadily the illuminated crescent of the planet grew in bulk and definition, until we could plainly distinguish all the features of her disc without the aid of glasses.  For the most part she was wrapped in clouds, of a dazzling lustre at the equator, and duskier towards the poles.  Here and there a gap in the vapour revealed the summit of a mountain range, or the dark surface of a plain or sea.

I need hardly say that none of us viewed the majestic approach of this new world, suspended in the ether, and visibly turning round its axis, without emotion.  The boundary of day and night was fairly well marked, and I pictured to myself the wave of living creatures rising from their sleep to life and activity on one side, and going to sleep again on the other, as it crept slowly over the surface.  To compare small things with great, the denizens of a planet reminded me of performers under the limelight of a darkened theatre: 

    “All the world’s a stage!”

We amused ourselves with conjectures as to our probable fate on Venus, supposing we should arrive there safe and sound.

“I suppose the authorities will demand our passports,” said I.  “Perhaps we shall be tried and condemned to death for invading a friendly planet.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me in the least,” said Gazen, “if they were to put us into their zoological gardens as a rare species of monkey.”

“What a ridiculous idea!” exclaimed Miss Carmichael.  “Now I feel sure they will pay us divine honours.  Won’t it be nice?”

“You will make a perfect divinity,” rejoined the professor with consummate gallantry.  “For my part I shall feel more at home in a menagerie.”