y were dropping through the fifteen-year-long
twilight that reigns over that portion of the globe of Saturn which,
during half of his year of thirty terrestrial years, is turned away from
the Sun.

The further they fell towards the rings the more certain it became that
the theory of the great English astronomer was the correct one. Seen
through the telescopes at a distance of only thirty or forty thousand
miles, it became perfectly plain that the outer or darker ring as seen
from the Earth was composed of myriads of tiny bodies so far separated
from each other that the rayless blackness of Space could be seen
through them.

"It's quite evident," said Redgrave, after a long look through his
telescope, "that those are rings of what we should call meteorites on
Earth, atoms of matter which Saturn threw off into Space after the
satellites were formed."

"And I shouldn't wonder, if you will excuse my interrupting you," said
Zaidie, "if the moons themselves have been made up of a lot of these
things going together when they were only gas, or nebula, or something
of that sort. In fact, when Saturn was a good deal younger than he is
now, he may have had a lot more rings and no moons, and now these
aerolites, or whatever they are, can't come together and make moons,
because they've got too solid."

Meanwhile the _Astronef_ was rapidly approaching that portion of
Saturn's surface which was illuminated by the rays of the Sun, streaming
under the lower arch of the inner ring.

As they passed under it the whole scene suddenly changed. The rings
vanished. Overhead was an arch of brilliant light a hundred miles thick,
spanning the whole of the visible heavens. Below lay the sunlit surface
of Saturn divided into light and dark bands of enormous breadth.

The band immediately below them was of a brilliant silver-grey, very
much like the central zone of Jupiter. North of this on the one side
stretched the long shadow of the rings, and southward other bands of
alternating white and gold and deep purple succeeded each other till
they were lost in the curvature of the vast planet. The poles were of
course invisible since the _Astronef_ was now too near the surface; but
on their approach they had seen unmistakable evidence of snow and ice.

As soon as they were exactly under the Ring-arch, Redgrave shut off the
R. Force, and, somewhat to their astonishment, the _Astronef_ began to
revolve slowly on its axis, giving them the idea that