.

Day after day Zaidie and her husband had been exhausting the
possibilities of the English language in attempting to describe to each
other the multiplying marvels of the wondrous scene which they were
approaching at a speed of more than a hundred miles a second, and at
length Zaidie, after nearly an hour's absolute silence, during which
they sat with eyes fastened to their telescopes, looked up and said:

"It's no use, Lenox, all the fine words that we've been trying to think
of have just been wasted. The angels may have a language that you could
describe that in, but we haven't. If it wouldn't be something like
blasphemy I should drop down to the commonplace, and call Saturn a
celestial spinning-top, with bands of light and shadow instead of
colours all round it."

"Not at all a bad simile either," laughed Redgrave, as he got up from
his chair with a yawn and a stretch of his long limbs, "still, it's as
well that you said celestial, for, after all, that's about the best word
we've found yet. Certainly the Ringed World is the most nearly heavenly
thing we've seen so far.

"But," he went on, "I think it's about time we were stopping this
headlong fall of ours. Do you see how the landscape is spreading out
round us? That means that we are dropping pretty fast. Whereabouts would
you like to land? At present we're heading straight for Saturn's north
pole."

"I think I'd rather see what the rings are like first," said Zaidie;
"couldn't we go across them?"

"Certainly we can," he replied, "only we'll have to be a bit careful."

"Careful, what of--collisions? Are you thinking of Proctor's hypothesis
that the rings are formed of multitudes of tiny satellites?"

"Yes, but I should go a little farther than that, I should say that his
rings and his eight satellites are to Saturn what the planets generally
and the ring of the Asteroides are to the Sun, and if that is the
case--I mean if we find the rings made up of myriads of tiny bodies
flying round with Saturn--it might get a bit risky.

"You see the outside ring is a bit over 160,000 miles across, and it
revolves in less than eleven hours. In other words we might find the
ring a sort of celestial maelstrom, and if we once got into the whirl,
and Saturn exerted his full pull on us, we might become a satellite,
too, and go on swinging round with the rest for a good bit of eternity."

"Very well then," she said, "of course we don't want to do anything of
that sort, b