like fires beneath the blazing sun. It looked very rich and gorgeous in its varied colours—a splendid and majestic spectacle; none the less so, because every point we could see had now for us some pleasing reminiscence of what we had beheld when viewing it more nearly. Higher still we went, till Mars seemed as a huge globe beneath our feet.
Our first start was, as I said, for the moon of Deimos, one of the two little satellites of Mars. It is one of the smallest of the worlds of the solar system, for few even of the planetoids are so minute. Its surface is smaller than that of the Isle of Wight. London might have almost covered one of its hemispheres, and Paris would have taken up a great part of it. It was a half-moon when we approached it, and its aspect, part black as night, part shining in the sunlight, was very striking. At first it seemed as a huge balloon rolling through space; but, as we drew nearer, the rocks and cliffs showed it a tiny world, hardly deserving the name of world, were it not for its regular orbit and its position in space as definite a satellite as, comparatively, huge Titan or your Moon.
The aspect of Deimos is very striking. Its size is so small, that you feel that it is a globe even when upon it; indeed, it appears little more than a colossal meteor, an expanse of
