They had seen the stars pale rapidly and then the flash of dawn.  The Sun rushed up and at once began to grow larger.  Earth, with her curved sides still diminishing violently, was soon a small round garden in blue and filmy space, in which mountains were planted.  And still the Sun was growing wider and wider.  And now Rodriguez, though he knew nothing of Sun or planets, perceived the obvious truth of their terrible journey:  they were heading straight for the Sun.  But the spirit of Morano was merely astounded; yet, being free of the body he suffered none of those inconveniences that perturbation may bring to us:  spirits do not gasp, or palpitate, or weaken, or sicken.

The dwindling Earth seemed now no more than the size of some unmapped island seen from a mountain-top, an island a hundred yards or so across, looking like a big table.

Speed is comparative:  compared to sound, their pace was beyond comparison; nor could any modern projectile attain any velocity comparable to it; even the speed of explosion was slow to it.  And yet for spirits they were moving slowly, who being independent of all material things, travel with such velocities as that, for instance, of thought.  But they were controlled by one still dwelling on Earth, who used material things, and the material that the Professor was using to hurl them upon their journey was light, the adaptation of which to this purpose he had learned at Saragossa.  At the pace of light they were travelling towards the Sun.

They crossed the path of Venus, far from where Venus then was, so that she scarcely seemed larger to them; Earth was but little bigger than the Evening Star, looking dim in that monstrous daylight.

Crossing the path of Mercury, Mercury appeared huger than our Moon, an object weirdly unnatural; and they saw ahead of them the terrific glare in which Mercury basks, from a Sun whose withering orb had more than doubled its width since they came from the hills of Earth.  And after this the Sun grew terribly larger, filling the centre of the sky, and spreading and spreading and spreading.  It was now that they saw what would have dazzled eyes, would have burned up flesh and would have shrivelled every protection that our scientists’ ingenuity could have devised even today.  To speak of time there is meaningless.  There is nothing in the empty space between the Sun and Mercury with which time is at all concerned.  Far less is there meaning in time wherever the spirits of men are under stress.  A few minutes’ bombardment in a trench, a few hours in a battle, a few weeks’ travelling in a trackless country; these minutes, these hours, these weeks can never be few.

Rodriguez and Morano had been travelling about six or seven minutes, but it seems idle to say so.

And then the Sun began to fill the whole sky in front of them.  And in another minute, if minutes had any meaning, they were heading for a boundless region of flame that, left and right, was everywhere, and now towered above them, and went below them into a flaming abyss.