were looking on a stranger sight than man
or woman had ever seen before.

Underneath the inner cloud-veil the atmosphere of Saturn appeared to
them somewhat as the lower depths of the ocean would appear to a diver,
granted that he was able to see for hundreds of miles about him. Its
colour was a pale greenish yellow. The outside thermometers showed that
the temperature was a hundred and seventy-five Fahrenheit. In fact, the
interior of the _Astronef_ was getting uncomfortably like a Turkish
bath, and Redgrave took the opportunity of at once freshening and
cooling the air by releasing a little oxygen from the cylinders.

From what they could see of the surface of Saturn it seemed to be a dead
level, greyish brown in colour, and not divided into oceans and
continents. In fact there were no signs whatever of water within range
of their telescopes. There was nothing that looked like cities, or any
human habitations, but the ground, as they got nearer to it, seemed to
be covered with a very dense vegetable growth, not unlike gigantic forms
of seaweed, and of somewhat the same colour. In fact, as Zaidie
remarked, the surface of Saturn was not at all unlike what the floors of
the ocean of the Earth might be if they were laid bare.

It was evident that the life of this portion of Saturn was not what, for
want of a more exact word, might be called terrestrial. Its inhabitants,
however they were constituted, floated about in the depths of this
semi-gaseous ocean as the denizens of earthly seas did in the
terrestrial oceans. Already their telescopes enabled them to make out
enormous moving shapes, black and grey-brown and pale red, swimming
about, evidently by their own volition, rising and falling and often
sinking down on to the gigantic vegetation which covered the surface,
possibly for the purpose of feeding. But it was also evident that they
resembled the inhabitants of earthly oceans in another respect, since it
was easy to see that they preyed upon each other.

"I don't like the look of those creatures at all," said Zaidie, when the
_Astronef_ had come to a stop and was floating about ten miles above the
surface. "They're altogether too uncanny. They look to me something like
jelly-fish about the size of whales, only they have eyes and mouths. Did
you ever see such awful-looking eyes, bigger than soup-plates and as
bright as a cat's. I suppose that's because of the dim light. And the
nasty wormy sort of way they swim, o