I laid down the letter. Dan did not speak; his questioning eyes were on my face. Freddie said huskily, "Well--" and stopped. "Well," I said, "that's all." We stared at one another. As though by consent, with a common dread we avoided discussion of what now lay before us--the landing, the opening of our door to admit this strange new world. Its air, different from that to which we were accustomed, would come in. _And other things!_ What other things? The three words abruptly held for me an uncanniness almost intolerable. Something not to be faced--yet we would have to face it. "Absurd!" I thought. "Why, father is there--and Hulda. And Zetta--" In truth, it was more an unreasoning dread than fear; for, as I examined it, I found that, more than anything in life, I desired now to reach Xenephrene and my loved ones; and all the vague, mysteriously uncanny things in the Universe could not have served to keep me from them. "Hey!" said Freddie. "You seeing ghosts already, Peter?" "Where's the map?" said Dan. "Let's look it over." We examined it. A crude drawing upon animal skin the same as served for father's letter paper. It seemed plain enough. We discussed it, and many of the other phases of father's letter. It all seemed very explicit. We were, according to father's calculated time, exactly where in imagination his hopes would now be placing us. If all went well--as, indeed, why should it not?--we would arrive upon one of those nights in the full of the moon during which he would expect us. As he surmised, our small telescope had long since showed us Xenephrene's moon. A tiny blazing point--purple like the planet itself. It showed now, just plunging behind its parent disk; a purple point of light, with its leaping tongues of flame even to the naked eye a quite visible corona. Our approach to Xenephrene! I might write for hours and barely touch upon the beauty, the splendor, the wonder of it. A purple disk, a tinging with red as we neared it. Convex now--a full, round, glowing world, banked and mottled with clouds, beneath which the faint configurations of its surface-marking gradually became visible. We headed for its south pole; rounded over it at some fifty thousand miles' distance. We saw over us, hanging to the left, the blazing purple moon. It was night, as father said, on this moonlit side of the planet. For what would have been an earth-day of twelve hours or more, we dropped downward into the shadow. The sun was hidden behind Xenephrene now; the moon blazed on us in all its purple glory. [Illustration: It was night on this moonlit side of Xenephrene as we dropped down toward it. The sun was hidden behind the planet and the moon blazed up through the glass floor of our space ship in all its purple glory.]