w plainly we could see the Rockies and the Andes?"

"Oh, yes, I see; they're mountains; thirty-seven miles high, some of
them, they say; and the rest of the silver-grey will be clouds, I
suppose. Fancy living under clouds like those."

"Only another case of the adaptation of life to natural conditions, I
expect. When we get there I daresay we shall find that these clouds are
just what make it possible for the inhabitants of Venus to stand the
extremes of heat and cold. Given elevations three or four times as high
as the Himalayas, it would be quite possible for them to choose their
temperature by shifting their altitude.

"But I think it's about time to drop theory and see to the practice," he
continued, getting up from his chair and going to the signal board in
the conning-tower. "Whatever the planet Venus may be like, we don't want
to charge it at the rate of sixty miles a second. That's about the speed
now, considering how fast she's travelling towards us."

"And considering that, whether it is a nice world or not it's nearly as
big as the Earth, I guess we should get rather the worst of the charge,"
laughed Zaidie as she went back to her telescope.

Redgrave sent a signal down to Murgatroyd to reverse engines, as it
were, or, in other words, to direct the "R. Force" against the planet,
from which they were now only a couple of hundred thousand miles
distant. The next moment the sun and stars seemed to halt in their
courses. The great golden-grey crescent, which had been increasing in
size every moment, appeared to remain stationary, and then, when he was
satisfied that the engines were developing the Force properly, he sent
another signal down, and the _Astronef_ began to descend.

The half-disc of Venus seemed to fall below them, and in a few minutes
they could see it from the upper deck spreading out like a huge
semi-circular plain of light ahead and on both sides of them. The
_Astronef_ was falling at the rate of about a thousand miles a minute
towards the centre of the half-crescent, and every moment the brilliant
spots above the cloud-surface grew in size and brightness.

"I believe the theory about the enormous height of the mountains of
Venus must be correct after all," said Redgrave, tearing himself with an
evident wrench away from his telescope. "Those white patches can't be
anything else but the summits of snow-capped mountains. You know how
brilliantly white a snow-peak looks on earth against the wh