But perforce I resigned myself to my fate.  At any rate it would the sooner be all over.  In fact, I almost forgot my awful situation in the interest awakened by the phenomena of the comet.  I was in the midst of its very head.  I was one of its component particles.  I was a meteor among a million millions of others.  If I could only get back to the earth, what news could I not carry to Signor Schiaparelli and Mr. Lockyer and Dr. Bredichin about the composition of comets!  But, alas! the world could never know what I now saw.  Nobody on yonder gleaming earth, watching the magnificent advance of this “specter of the skies,” would ever dream that there was a lost astronomer in its blazing head.  I should be burned and rent to pieces amid the terrors of its perihelion passage, and my fragments would be strewn along the comet’s orbit, to become, in course of time, particles in a swarm of aerolites.  Perchance, through the effects of some unforeseen perturbation, the earth might encounter that swarm.  Thus only could I ever return to the bosom of my mother planet.  I took a positive pleasure in imagining that one of my calcined bones might eventually flash for a moment, a falling star, in the atmosphere of the earth, leaving its atoms to slowly settle through the air, until finally they rested in the soil from which they had sprung.

From such reflections I was aroused by the approach of the crisis.  The head of the comet had become an exceedingly uncomfortable place.  The collisions among the meteors were constantly increasing in number and violence.  How I escaped destruction I could not comprehend, but in fact I was unconscious of danger from that source.  I had become in spirit an actual component of the clashing, roaring mass.  Tremendous sparks of electricity, veritable lightning strokes, darted about me in every direction, but I bore a charmed life.  As the comet drew in nearer to the sun, under the terrible stress of the solar attraction, the meteors seemed to crowd closer, crashing and grinding together, while the whole mass swayed and shrieked with the uproar of a million tormented devils.  The heat had become terrific.  I saw stone and iron melted like snow and dissipated in steam.  Stupendous jets of white-hot vapor shot upward, and, driven off by the electrical repulsion of the sun, streamed backward into the tail.

Suddenly I myself became sensible of the awful heat.  It seemed without warning to have penetrated my vitals.  With a yell I jerked my feet from a boiling rock and flung my arms despairingly over my head.

“You had better be careful,” said my wife, “or you’ll knock over the telescope.”

I rubbed my eyes, shook myself, and rose.

“I must have been dreaming,” I said.

“I should think it was a very lively dream,” she replied.

I responded after the manner of a young man newly wed.

At this moment the occultation began.

CHAPTER VI