ce which brought us into far greater peril
than had our encounter with the meteor.

The airships had been partitioned off so that a portion of the interior
could be darkened in order to serve as a sleeping chamber, wherein,
according to the regulations prescribed by the commander of the squadron
each member of the expedition in his turn passed eight out of every
twenty-four hours--sleeping if he could, if not, meditating in a more or
less dazed way, upon the wonderful things that he was seeing and
doing--things far more incredible than the creations of a dream.

One morning, if I may call by the name morning the time of my periodical
emergence from the darkened chamber, glancing from one of the windows, I
was startled to see in the black sky a brilliant comet.

No periodical comet, as I knew, was at this time approaching the
neighborhood of the sun, and no stranger of that kind had been detected
from the observatories making its way sunward before we left the earth.
Here, however, was unmistakably a comet rushing toward the sun, flinging
out a great gleaming tail behind it and so close to us that I wondered
to see it remaining almost motionless in the sky. This phenomenon was
soon explained to me, and the explanation was of a most disquieting
character.

The stranger had already been perceived, not only from the flagship, but
from the other members of the squadron, and, as I now learned, efforts
had been made to get out of the neighborhood, but for some reason the
electrical apparatus did not work perfectly--some mysterious disturbing
force acting upon it--and so it had been found impossible to avoid an
encounter with the comet, not an actual coming into contact with it, but
a falling into the sphere of its influence.

In fact, I was informed that for several hours the squadron had been
dragging along in the wake of a comet, very much as boats are sometimes
towed off by a wounded whale. Every effort had been made to so adjust
the electric charge upon the ships that they would be repelled from the
cometic mass, but, owing apparently to electric changes 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