and yet, as we all know, it is smaller far than either your world or than ours. At length the whole expanse beneath us, the equatorial region of Mars, was red or green. Then the ruddy shores of Copernicus and Galileo continents only were in sight on the horizon, with the two great islands which earth's astronomers call Tycho's Island and Schroeter's Land. All else was the green ocean absorbing the sun's rays into its dark emerald verdure. On we flew to the crystal peaks covered with snows of the great Ice Island. They were huge mountains, not unlike your Alpine group of Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa. A vast region of snowy peaks glittering in the Sun, but unlike Switzerland, not set in green, heaving lands, but in the storm-toss'd waves of the Delarue Ocean —like the peak of Teneriffe in the Atlantic.
Down we sank until at last the anti-gravitating power had to be used to stem the impetus, and even when we reached the snowy peak of one of the ice mountains, we struck it with a violence that almost cracked the rock. Our vessel was, however, strongly constructed, and so it was merely shaken.
Again I felt the joy of treading the firm ground of another world. This was the fourth I had stood upon. My native world had even
