So far as I was personally concerned, I had not felt the slightest inconvenience from the sun’s rays. I declared as much, and the others likewise so expressed themselves. "There’s another one of the things!" spoke up Meigs, pointing in another direction. We were just able to detect a glow on another low elevation when it also flashed into thin air. Then we began looking for the little hills, and counted no less than a dozen within our range of vision. Some of the hills were capped with the mysterious gleam, which dazzled for a time and then twinkled out. The professor was perplexed, as I could see plainly. "We’ll examine one of those hills," said Meigs, "and find out what this means." The top of the volcano, where we were standing, was perhaps five hundred feet from the plain. As Meigs spoke, he leaped for a rock a yard or so below him. To the astonishment of all of us, he rose in the air like a human balloon, soared over the rock by a score of feet, and alighted several rods down the slope. It was a titanic jump, but Meigs had regained a foothold with the lightness of a piece of down. He was a large man, was Meigs, his ponderosity exceeding two hundred pounds, Fairbanks. He was as much surprised at his agility as we were, and began to essay various feats. He leaped straight upward, gaining a maximum height of a dozen yards and returning lightly and easily to his original position. Next he coupled his leap with an aerial somersault, and carried on with an abandon much beneath the dignity of a Wall Street broker, as it struck me. In fact, he acted like a schoolboy out for a holiday, and so full of animal spirits he hardly knew what to do with himself. "You’d think he belonged to a circus," observed the disgusted Popham. "I’ll go down there and put a stop to the performance." "And I’ll go along and help," added Markham, visibly distracted because of the broker’s folly. They started down the steep with rod-long steps; and presently one would have thought they wore seven-league boots from the amount of speed they developed. Instead of putting a stop to the broker’s performance they joined in. By and by they were playing leapfrog, every bound taking them forward half a hundred feet. "Gravity here is far from having the force it has on Terra," remarked the professor. "Exertion comes easy and gives most astonishing results. Those men, Mr. Munn, are not used to such activity, yet their marvelous gymnastics do not seem to tire them in the least. Suppose that we ourselves make a test of the Mercurial gravity?" I needed no second bidding, and Quinn and I took the descent as buoyantly as thistle-down before the wind. Somehow the lightness of our heels got into our heads, and the staid professor and myself began cavorting like a pair of ten-year-olds. The delightful freedom of movement, was as novel as it was exhilarating. Liberty of muscle bred license of mind; had we been smoking opium we could not have acted more outrageously.