proach 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

JUPITER, THE GREATEST OF KNOWN WORLDS

When we are thinking of worlds, and trying to exalt the imagination with
them, it is well to turn to Jupiter, for there is a planet worth
pondering upon! A world thirteen hundred times as voluminous as the
earth is a phenomenon calculated to make us feel somewhat as the
inhabitant of a rural village does when his amazed vision ranges across
the million roofs of a metropolis. Jupiter is the first of the outer and
greater planets, the major, or Jovian, group. His mean diameter is
86,500 miles, and his average girth more than 270,000 miles. An
inhabitant of Jupiter, in making a trip around his planet, along any
great circle of the sphere, would have to travel more than 30,000 miles
farther than the distance between the earth and the moon. The polar
compression of Jupiter, owing to his rapid rotation, amounts in the
aggregate to more than 5,000 miles, the equatorial diameter being 88,200
miles and th