eccentric changes continually
going on in the electric charge affecting the clashing mass of meteoric
bodies which constituted the head of the comet, we found it impossible
to escape from its influence.

At one instant the ships would be repelled; immediately afterward they
would be attracted again, and thus they were dragged hither and thither,
but never able to break from the invisible leash which the comet had
cast upon them. The latter was moving with enormous velocity toward
the sun, and, consequently, we were being carried back again, away from
the object of our expedition, with a fair prospect of being dissipated
in blazing vapors when the comet had dragged us, unwilling prisoners,
into the immediate neighborhood of the solar furnace.

Even the most cool-headed lost his self-control in this terrible
emergency. Every kind of device that experience or the imagination
could suggest was tried, but nothing would do. Still on we rushed with
the electrified atoms composing the tail of the comet sweeping to and
fro over the members of the squadron, as they shifted their position,
like the plume of smoke from a gigantic steamer, drifting over the sea
birds that follow in its course.

Is This the End?

Was this to end it all, then? Was this the fate that Providence had
in store for us? Were the hopes of the earth thus to perish? Was the
expedition to be wrecked and its fate to remain forever unknown to the
planet from which it had set forth? And was our beloved globe, which had
seemed so fair to us when we last looked upon it near by, and in whose
defence we had resolved to spend our last breath, to be left helpless
and at the mercy of its implacable foe in the sky?

At length we gave ourselves up for lost. There seemed to be no possible
way to free ourselves from the baleful grip of this terrible and
unlooked-for enemy.

Giving Up All Hope.

As the comet approached the sun its electric energy rapidly increased,
and watching it with telescopes, for we could not withdraw our fascinated
eyes from it, we could clearly behold the fearful things that went on
in its nucleus.

This consisted of an immense number of separate meteors of no very great
size individually, but which were in constant motion among one another,
darting to and fro, clashing and smashing together, while fountains of
blazing metallic particles and hot mineral vapors poured out in every
direction.

A Flying Hell.

As I watched it, unable t