ut there's something else I think we could do," she went on,
taking up a copy of Proctor's "Saturn and its System," which she had
been reading just after breakfast. "You see those rings are, all
together, about 10,000 miles broad; there's a gap of about 1,700 miles
between the big dark one and the middle bright one, and it's nearly
10,000 miles from the edge of the bright ring to the surface of Saturn.
Now why shouldn't we get in between the inner ring and the planet? If
Proctor was right and the rings are made of tiny satellites and there
are myriads of them, of course they'll pull up while Saturn pulls down.
In fact Flammarion says somewhere that along Saturn's equator there is
no weight at all."

"Quite possible," replied Redgrave, "and, if you like, we'll go and
prove it. Of course, if the _Astronef_ weighs absolutely nothing between
Saturn and the rings, we can easily get away. The only thing that I
object to is getting into this 170,000-mile vortex, being whizzed round
with Saturn every ten and a half hours, and sauntering round the Sun at
21,000 miles an hour."

"Don't!" she said. "Really it isn't good to think about these things,
situated as we are. Fancy, in a single year of Saturn there are nearly
25,000 Earth-days. Why, we should each of us be about thirty years older
when we got round, even if we lived, which, of course, we shouldn't. By
the way, how long could we live for, if the worst came to the worst?"

"Given water, about one Earth-year at the outside;" "but, of course, we
shall be home long before that."

"If we don't become one of the satellites of Saturn," she replied, "or
get dragged away by something into the outer depths of Space."

Meanwhile the downward speed of the _Astronef_ had been considerably
checked. The vast circle of the rings seemed to suddenly expand, and
soon it covered the whole floor of the Vault of Space.

As she dropped towards what might be called the limit of the northern
tropic of Saturn, the spectacle presented by the rings became every
minute more and more marvellous--purple and silver, black and gold,
dotted with myriads of brilliant points of many-coloured light, they
stretched upwards like vast rainbows into the Saturnian sky as the
_Astronef's_ position changed with regard to the horizon of the planet.
The nearer they approached the surface, the nearer the gigantic arch of
the many-coloured rings approached the zenith. Sun and stars sank down
behind it, for now the