of which they knew so
little, all things were possible.

Ayrault manipulated the silk-covered glass handles, and the Callisto
moved on slowly in comparison with its recent speed, and all remained
glued to their telescopes as they peered through the rushing clouds,
now forming and now dissolving before their eyes. What transports of
delight, what ecstatic bliss, was theirs! Men had discovered and
mastered the secret of apergy, and now, "little lower than the angels,"
they could soar through space, leaving even planets and comets behind.

"Is it not strange," said Dr. Cortlandt, "that though it has been known
for over a century that bodies charged with unlike electricities
attract one another, and those charged with like repel, no one thought
of utilizing the counterpart of gravitation? In the nineteenth
century, savants and Indian jugglers performed experiments with their
disciples and masses of inert matter, by causing them to remain without
visible support at some distance from the ground; and while many of
these, of course, were quacks, some were on the right track, though
they did not push their research."

President Bearwarden and Ayrault assented. They were steering for an
apparently hard part of the planet's surface, about a degree and a half
north of its equator.

"Since Jupiter's axis is almost at right angles to the plane of its
orbit," said the doctor, "being inclined only about one degree and a
half, instead of twenty-three and a half, as was the earth's till
nearly so recently, it will be possible for us to have any climate we
wish, from constantly warm at the equator to constantly cool or cold as
we approach the poles, without being troubled by extremes of winter and
summer."

Until the Callisto entered the planet's atmosphere, its five moons
appeared like silver shields against the black sky, but now things were
looking more terrestrial, and they began to feel at home. Bearwarden
put down his note-book, and Ayrault returned a photograph to his
pocket, while all three gazed at their new abode. Beneath them was a
vast continent variegated by chains of lakes and rivers stretching away
in all directions except toward the equator, where lay a placid ocean
as far as their telescopes could pierce. To the eastward were towering
and massive mountains, and along the southern border of the continent
smoking volcanoes, while toward the west they saw forests, gently
rolling plains, and table-lands that