(continued)

"It is air," said Cavor.  "It must be air—or it would not rise like this—at the mere touch of a sun-beam.  And at this pace . . ."

He peered upwards.  "Look!" he said.

"What?" I asked.

"In the sky.  Already.  On the blackness—a little touch of blue.  See!  The stars seem larger.  And the little ones and all those dim nebulosities we saw in empty space—they are hidden!"

Swiftly, steadily, the day approached us.  Gray summit after gray summit was overtaken by the blaze, and turned to a smoking white intensity.  At last there was nothing to the west of us but a bank of surging fog, the tumultuous advance and ascent of cloudy haze.  The distant cliff had receded farther and farther, had loomed and changed through the whirl, and foundered and vanished at last in its confusion.

Nearer came that steaming advance, nearer and nearer, coming as fast as the shadow of a cloud before the south-west wind.  About us rose a thin anticipatory haze.

Cavor gripped my arm.  "What?" I said.

"Look!  The sunrise!  The sun!"

He turned me about and pointed to the brow of the eastward cliff, looming above the haze about us, scarce lighter than the darkness of the sky.  But now its line was marked by strange reddish shapes, tongues of vermilion flame that writhed and danced.  I fancied it must be spirals of vapour that had caught the light and made this crest of fiery tongues against the sky, but indeed it was the solar prominences I saw, a crown of fire about the sun that is forever hidden from earthly eyes by our atmospheric veil.

And then—the sun!

Steadily, inevitably came a brilliant line, came a thin edge of intolerable effulgence that took a circular shape, became a bow, became a blazing sceptre, and hurled a shaft of heat at us as though it was a spear.

It seemed verily to stab my eyes!  I cried aloud and turned about blinded, groping for my blanket beneath the bale.

And with that incandescence came a sound, the first sound that had reached us from without since we left the earth, a hissing and rustling, the stormy trailing of the aerial garment of the advancing day.  And with the coming of the sound and the light the sphere lurched, and blinded and dazzled we staggered helplessly against each other.  It lurched again, and the hissing grew louder.  I had shut my eyes perforce, I was making clumsy efforts to cover my head with my blanket, and this second lurch sent me helplessly off my feet.  I fell against the bale, and opening my eyes had a momentary glimpse of the air just outside our glass.  It was running—it was boiling—like snow into which a white-hot rod is thrust.  What had been solid air had suddenly at the touch of the sun become a paste, a mud, a slushy liquefaction, that hissed and bubbled into gas.

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