A Honeymoon in Space
"I believe the theory about the enormous height of the mountains of
Venus must be correct after all," said Redgrave, tearing himself with an
evident wrench away from his telescope. "Those white patches can't be
anything else but the summits of snow-capped mountains. You know how
brilliantly white a snow-peak looks on earth against the whitest of
clouds."
"Oh, yes," said Zaidie, "I've often seen that in the Rockies. But it's
lunch-time, and I must go down and see how my things in the kitchen are
getting on. I suppose you'll try and land somewhere where it's morning,
so that we can have a good day before us. Really, it's very convenient
to be able to make your own morning or night as you like, isn't it? I
hope it won't make us too conceited when we get back, being able to
choose our mornings and our evenings; in fact, our sunrises and sunsets
on any world we like to visit in a casual way like this."
"Well," laughed Redgrave, as she moved away towards the companion
stairs, "after all, if you find the United States, or even the Planet
Terra, too small for you, we've always got the fields of Space open to
us. We might take a trip across the Zodiac or down the Milky Way."
"And meanwhile," she replied, stopping at the top of the stairs and
looking round, "I'll go down and get lunch. You and I may be king and
queen of the realms of Space, and all that sort of thing, but we've got
to eat and drink, after all."
"And that reminds me," said Redgrave, getting up and following her, "we
must celebrate our arrival on a new world as usual. I'll go down and get
out the wine. I shouldn't be surprised if we found the people of the
Love-World living on nectar and ambrosia, and as fizz is our nearest
approach to nectar----"
"I suppose," said Zaidie, as she gathered up her skirts and stepped
daintily down the companion stairs, "if you find anything human, or at
least human enough to eat and drink, you'll have a party and give them
champagne. I wonder what those wretches on Mars would have thought of it
if we'd only made friends with them?"
Lunch on board the _Astronef_ was about the pleasantest meal of the day.
Of course, there was neither day nor night, in the ordinary sense of the
word, except as the hours were measured off by the chronometers.
Whichever side or end of the vessel received the direct rays of the sun,
was bathed in blazing heat and dazzling light. Elsewhere there was black
darkness and the more than icy cold of Space; but lunch was a convenient
division of the waking hours, which began with a stroll on the upper
deck and a view of the ever-varying splendours about them, and ended
after dinner in the same place with coffee and cigarettes and
speculations as to the next day's happenings.
This lunch-hour passed even more pleasantly and rapidly than others had
done, for the discussion as to the possibilities of Venus was continued
in a quite delightful mixture of scientific disquisition and that
converse which is common to most human beings on their honeymoon.
As there was nothing more to be done or seen for an hour or two, the
afternoon was spent in a pleasant siesta in the luxurious deck-saloon;
because evening to them would be morning on that portion of Venus to
which they were directing their course, and, as Zaidie said, when she
subsided into her hammock:
It would be breakfast-time before they could get dinner.
As the _Astronef_ fell with ever-increasing velocity towards the
cloud-covered surface of Venus, the remainder of her disc, lit up by the
radiance of her sister-worlds, Mercury, Mars, and the Earth, and also by
the pale radiance of an enormous comet, which had suddenly shot into
view from behind its southern limb, became more or less visible.
Towards six o'clock it became necessary to exert nearly the whole
strength of her engines to check the velocity of her fall. By eight she
had entered the atmosphere of Venus, and was dropping slowly towards a
vast sea of sunlit cloud, out of which, on all sides, towered thousands
of snow-clad peaks, rounded summits, and widespread stretches of upland
about which the clouds swept and surged like the silent billows of some
vast ocean in Ghostland.
"I thought so!" said Redgrave, when the propellers had begun to revolve
and Murgatroyd had taken his place in the conning-tower. "A very dense
atmosphere loaded with clouds. There's the Sun just rising, so your
ladyship's wishes are duly obeyed."
"And doesn't it seem nice and homelike to see him rising through an
atmosphere above the clouds again? It doesn't look a bit like the same
sort of dear old Sun just blazing like a red-hot Moon among a lot of
white-hot stars and planets. Look, aren't those peaks lovely, and that
cloud-sea?--why, for all the world we might be in a balloon above the
Rockies or the Alps. And see," she continued, pointing to one of the
thermometers fixed outside the glass dome which covered the upper deck,
"it's only sixty-five even here. I wonder if we can breathe this air,
and--oh--I do wonder what we shall see on the other side of those
clouds."
"You shall have both questions answered in a few minutes," replied
Redgrave, going towards the conning-tower. "To begin with, I think we'll
land on that big snow-dome yonder, and do a little exploring. Where
there are snow and clouds there is moisture, and where there is moisture
a man ought to be able to breathe."
The _Astronef_, still falling, but now easily under the command of the
helmsman, shot forwards and downwards towards a vast dome of snow which,
rising some two thousand feet above the cloud-sea, shone with dazzling
brilliance in the light of the rising Sun. She landed just above the
edge of the clouds. Meanwhile they had put on their breathing-suits, and
Redgrave had seen that the air chamber through which they had to pass
from their own little world into the new ones that they visited was in
working order. When the outer door was opened and the ladder lowered he
stood aside, as he had done on the Moon, and Zaidie's was the first
human foot which made an imprint on the virgin snows of Venus.
The first thing Redgrave did was to raise the visor of his helmet and
taste the air of the new world. It was cool, and fresh, and sweet, and
the first draught of it sent the blood tingling and dancing through his
veins. Perfect as the arrangements of the _Astronef_ were in this
respect, the air of Venus tasted like clear running spring water would
have done to a man who had been drinking filtered water for several
days. He threw the visor right up and motioned to Zaidie to do the same.
She obeyed, and, after drawing a long breath, she said:
"That's glorious! It's like wine after water, and rather stagnant water
too. But what a world, snow-peaks and cloud-seas, islands of ice and
snow in an ocean of mist! Just look at them! Did you ever see anything
so lovely and unearthly in your life? I wonder how high this mountain
is, and what there is on the other side of the clouds. Isn't the air
delicious! Not a bit too cold after all--but, still, I think we may as
well go back and put on something more becoming. I shouldn't quite like
the ladies of Venus to see me dressed like a diver."
"Come along, then," laughed Lenox, as he turned back towards the vessel.
"That's just like a woman. You're about a hundred and fifty million
miles away from Broadway or Regent Street. You are standing on the top
of a snow mountain above the clouds of Venus, and the moment that you
find the air is fit to breathe you begin thinking about dress. How do
you know that the inhabitants of Venus, if there are any, dress at all?"
"What nonsense! Of course they do--at least, if they are anything like
us."
As soon as they got back on board the _Astronef_ and had taken their
breathing-dresses off, Redgrave and the old engineer, who appeared to
take no visible interest in their new surroundings, threw open all the
sliding doors on the upper and lower decks so that the vessel might be
thoroughly ventilated by the fresh sweet air. Then a gentle repulsion
was applied to the huge snow mass on which the _Astronef_ rested. She
rose a couple of hundred feet, her propellers began to whirl round, and
Redgrave steered her out towards the centre of the vast cloud-sea which
was almost surrounded by a thousand glittering peaks of ice and domes of
snow.
"I think we may as well put off dinner, or breakfast as it will be now,
until we see what the world below is like," he said to Zaidie, who was
standing beside him on the conning-tower.
"Oh, never mind about eating just now, this is altogether too wonderful
to be missed for the sake of ordinary meat and drink. Let's go down and
see what there is on the other side."
He sent a message down the speaking tube to Murgatroyd, who was below
among his beloved engines, and the next moment sun and clouds and
ice-peaks had disappeared and nothing was visible save the
all-enveloping silver-grey mist.
For several minutes they remained silent, watching and wondering what
they would find beneath the veil which hid the surface of Venus from
their view. Then the mist thinned out and broke up into patches which
drifted past them as they descended on their downward slanting course.
Below them they saw vast, ghostly shapes of mountains and valleys, lakes
and rivers, continents, islands, and seas. Every moment these became
more and more distinct, and soon they were in full view of the most
marvellous landscape that human eyes had ever beheld. The distances were
tremendous. Mountains, compared with which the Alps or even the Andes
would have seemed mere hillocks, towered up out of the vast depths
beneath them.
Up to the lower edge of the all-covering cloud-sea they were clad with a
golden-yellow vegetation, fields and forests, open, smiling valleys, and
deep, dark ravines through which a thousand torrents thundered down from
the eternal snows beyond, to spread themselves out in rivers and lakes
in the valleys and plains which lay many thousands of feet below.
"What a lovely world!" said Zaidie, as she at last found her voice after
what was almost a stupor of speechless wonder and admiration. "And the
light! Did you ever see anything like it? It's neither moonlight nor
sunlight. See, there are no shadows down there, it's just all lovely
silvery twilight. Lenox, if Venus is as nice as she looks from here I
don't think I shall want to go back. It reminds me of Tennyson's Lotus
Eaters, 'the Land where it is always afternoon.'
"I think you are right after all. We are thirty million miles nearer to
the Sun than we were on the Earth, and the light and heat have to filter
through those clouds. They are not at all like Earth clouds from this
side. It's the other way about. The silver lining is on this side. Look,
there isn't a black or a brown one, or even a grey one, within sight.
They are just like a thin mist, lighted by a million of electric lamps.
It's a delicious world, and if it isn't inhabited by angels it ought to
be."
CHAPTER XIII
While Zaidie was talking the _Astronef_ was sweeping swiftly down
towards the surface of Venus, through scenery of whose almost
inconceivable magnificence no human words could convey any adequate
idea. Underneath the cloud-veil the air was absolutely clear and
transparent, clearer, indeed, than terrestrial air at the highest
elevations reached by mountain-climbers, and, moreover, it seemed to be
endowed with a strange, luminous quality, which made objects, no matter
how distant, stand out with almost startling distinctness.
The rivers and lakes and seas which spread out beneath them, seemed
never to have been ruffled by blast of storm or breath of wind, and
their surfaces shone with a soft, silvery light, which seemed to come