. 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 devise 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 swinging 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.

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 for ever 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 nearby, and in whose
defense 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.

As the comet approached the sun its electrical 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 vapours poured out in every
direction.

As I watched it, unable to withdraw my eyes, I saw imaginary forms
revealing themselves amid the flaming meteors. They seemed like
creatures in agony, tossing their arms, bewailing in their attitudes the
awful fate that had overtaken them, and fairly chilling my blood with
the pantomime of torture which they exhibited. I thought of an old
superstition which I had often heard about the earth, and exclaimed:

"Yes, surely, this is a flying hell!"

As the electric activity of the comet increased, its continued change