I saw the ruddy disk of Mars, and the glinting of his icy poles, as the beautiful planet rolled far below me.  “If I could only get there,” I thought, “I should know what those canals of Schiaparelli are, and even if I could never return to the earth, I should doubtless meet with a warm welcome among the Martians.  What a lion I should be!” I looked longingly at the distant planet, the outlines of whose continents and seas appeared most enticing, but when I tried to propel myself in that direction I only kicked against nothingness.  I groaned in desperation.

Suddenly something darted by me flying sunward; then another and another.  In a minute I was surrounded by strange projectiles.  Every instant I expected to be dashed in pieces by them.  They sped with the velocity of lightning.  Hundreds, thousands of them were all about me.  My chance of not being hit was not one in a million, and yet I escaped.  The sweat of terror was upon me, but I did not lose my head.  “A comet has met me,” I said.  “These missiles are the meteoric stones of which it is composed.”  And now I noticed that as they rushed along collisions took place, and flashes of electricity darted from one to another.  A pale luminosity dimmed the stars.  I did not doubt that, as seen from the earth, the comet was already flinging the splendors of its train upon the bosom of the night.

While I was wondering at my immunity amid such a rain of death-threatening bolts, I became aware that their velocity was sensibly diminishing.  This fact I explained by supposing that I was drawn along with them.  Notwithstanding the absence of any collision with my body, the overpowering attraction of the whole mass of meteors was overcoming my tangential force and bearing me in their direction.  At first I rejoiced at this circumstance, for at any rate the comet would save me from the dreadful fate of becoming an asteroid.  A little further reflection, however, showed me that I had gone from the frying-pan into the fire.  The direction of my expulsion from Menippe had been such that I had fallen into an orbit that would have carried me around the sun without passing very close to the solar body.  Now, being swept along by the comet, whose perihelion probably lay in the immediate neighborhood of the sun, I saw no way of escape from the frightful fate of being broiled alive.  Even where I was, the untempered rays of the sun scorched me, and I knew that within two or three hundred thousand miles of the solar surface the heat must be sufficient to melt the hardest rocks.  I was aware that experiments with burning-glasses had sufficiently demonstrated that fact.