s head and sides; he
attempted to fly, and ran towards the brink of the ledge; but ere he
could gain sufficient impetus to launch himself into the air, he
staggered and fell heavily to the ground, with his broken wings beneath
him.

Gazen, quicker than her father, flew towards Miss Carmichael, and bent
over her.

"Is she alive?" enquired Carmichael, in breathless and trembling
accents.

"Yes, thank God," responded Gazen fervently; as he raised her hand to
his lips and kissed it.

There were tears of joy in his eyes, and I knew then what I had long
suspected, that he loved her.

Suddenly a loud croak in the distance caused us to look up, and we
beheld another dragon on the wing, coining rapidly towards us from a
pass among the mountains. There was not a moment to be lost, and Gazen,
taking Miss Carmichael in his arms, we all hurried on board the car,
eager to escape from this revolting spot.

CHAPTER XII

SUNWARD HO!

"By the way," said Gazen to me, "I've got a new theory for the rising
and sinking of the sun behind the cliffs at Womla--a theory that will
simply explode Professor Possil, and shake the Royal Astronomical
Society to its foundations."

The astronomer and I were together in the observatory, where he was
adjusting his telescope to look at the sun. After our misadventure with
the flying ape, we had returned to our former station on the summit of
the mountain, to pick up the drawing materials of Miss Carmichael; but
as Gazen was anxious to get as near the sun as possible, and being
disgusted with the infernal scenery as well as the foetid, malarial
atmosphere of Mercury, we left as soon as we had replenished our cistern
from the pools in the rock.

"Another theory?" I responded. "Thought you had settled that question."

"Alas, my friend, theories, like political treatises, are made to be
broken."

"Well, what do you think of it now?"

"You remember how we came to the conclusion that Schiaparelli was right,
and that the planet Venus, by rotating about her own axis in the same
time as she takes to revolve around the sun, always keeps the same face
turned to the sun, one hemisphere being in perpetual light and summer,
whilst the other is in perpetual darkness and winter?"

"Yes."

"You remember, too, how we explained the growing altitude of the sun in
the heavens which culminated on the great day of the Festival, by
supposing that the axis of the planet swayed to and from the sun so a