"I don’t know what good it will do me to go out with your exploring expedition," said Popham dejectedly; "in a country as hot as this there can be no earthly use for coal." "Or wearing apparel," added Meigs listlessly. "Cotton couldn’t grow in such a temperature. And as for wheat!" He shook his head wearily. Cotton and wheat were the abc of his Wall Street experience. Beyond those commodities he groped in the dark. "What sort of food can be grown on such a sun-baked planet?" grumbled Markham. The railway man was shouting something about watered stock, and his babbling was wafted up to us. "Gilhooly," added Markham, "is the only fortunate man in the party. Realization will blast the hopes and mayhap prove the death of the rest of us, while he—he cannot realize!" "You gentlemen lose courage too quickly," said the professor. "In my lectures on Venus I told you how that planet was inclined to the plane of its orbit. The axis of Mercury has a still greater inclination; in fact, the orb leans on itself as though about to fall. Its days are of about the same length as the days of Terra—only three minutes longer—but its years, owing to its contracted orbit, are much shorter. In eighty-eight days Mercury makes its round, so that each season is only twenty-two days in length. "At the poles of Mercury, in what answers to the polar regions of our own earth, there must be a more tempered climate——" "Then let us get there, by all means," cut in Popham. "In whatever we do," answered Quinn, "we must make haste slowly." "Let’s get out and look around, anyhow," cried Meigs. "It may happen, after all, that we have a world to conquer here, and I have not the patience to remain longer in this steel cell of yours." "Very good," returned the professor. "We will make our preparations and go forth." He shut off the flow of oxygen from the tank and then followed the rest of us to the under apartment, closing a steel door over the trap at the head of the stairs and locking it. Gilhooly, imagining himself a conductor, was walking around the edge of the circular divan collecting tickets from imaginary passengers. "Sing Sing!" he called out as the professor unlocked the door at the entrance and pulled it open. "Here’s where you get off, Munn," said Meigs maliciously. "Here’s where we all get off," returned the professor, smiling. Thereupon we passed hastily into the blinding glare of the Mercurial day. For several minutes our eyes rebelled at the brightness; when finally they became inured to it, we looked around us upon a desolation that struck dismay to our hearts. We saw then that our car had alighted upon an elevation which was nothing less than the rim of an extinct volcano of vast proportions. From ridge to ridge across the abysmal crater at least half a mile could be measured. It was beyond the power of our eyes to penetrate to the black depths of the great pit.