than to walk, and certainly not to fly. The pressure of gravitation of the huge planet made us feel that swimming was the most suitable mode of existence there. To walk was an effort, for one wanted a resisting medium, and this huge body was formed for the purpose of floating in the waters, or for plunging into its depths.
As we thus surveyed him with our electric lamp, which on his entry we had extinguished, another gigantic being entered the cave, and resting on another terrace also sank to sleep. The cavern darkened. We went to the opening. Night—the short night of Jupiter—was setting in. The sky was covered with stars, and three of the four moons were shining on the heaving waters. It was a wondrous scene—that ocean and its heaving waves, and the starry sky with those three moons shining in it.
On we went over the heaving ocean-surface, on for hundreds of miles. Now and then, however, floating islands did appear, heaving on the oceanic waves. Some of them appeared not to be natural, but artificial—the work of created intelligences; on some of these (as we were floating in the air) we could see the colossal Jovians resting on them. These islands were not like the ships of earth, merely
