"With recovered normality of senses we had gone to the windows. I want you to visualize first what always before we had seen. An inky black void everywhere surrounding us, in the center of which seemingly we hung motionless. The brilliant firmament of stars, freed from the distortion of earth's atmosphere; glittering, blazing like great diamonds. Pure white, blue-white, or tinged with yellow and red. The whole extent of the heavens swarming with them. The huge, spiral nebulous masses fleecy white, with tiny points of blazing white fire in them. And behind them all that distant ring of seeming star-dust--immeasurably distant yet glowing like a silver veil, which in the ancient books they called the 'Milky Way.' "Near at hand, above us were the tiny planets of our Solar System. The sun, only a pale white disk from out here near Saturn; the earth--a star very faint; red Mars, a tiny reddish dot. But Jupiter was brilliant; and Saturn from our proximity was stupendously beautiful. The globe itself--a great silver disk, with the sunlight to make a narrow portion of it into a blazing crescent. The darkened areas of the globe, even on the shadowed portion, were plain almost as the bands of Jupiter. And Saturn's rings! Concentric rings--the inner one a trifle darker--opened up to a narrow angle--a glowing silver band like a broad hat-brim encircling the planet--a hat-brim over 37,000 miles broad. [Illustration: "Saturn with its rings was stupendously beautiful from our proximity."] "This we saw, with ourselves of unchanging size. But now we were growing. The change was at first apparent only in the aspect of Saturn--since it was closest to us. The planet seemed to become a little smaller--shrinking and creeping toward us. A contraction of its size--and as though the space between us were diminishing. Yet--as a seeming paradox--the visual diameter of the globe and the rings remained almost the same. "It is difficult to describe. We seemed moving closer to Saturn, yet in no sense was there any apparent motion. The effect--the result--of seeming motion--not the motion itself. Martt presently went back to watch the dials. He called out to me when we had reached unit 1,000. A thousand times our original size--the vehicle now ten miles in earthly height. The change had now affected very slightly the entire firmament. Everywhere a seeming contraction--not so much in the aspect of the blazing star-points, but in the black void of Space itself. As though the void were smaller--contracted so that everything in it were of necessity a little nearer to us. But it was as yet barely noticeable. I might even have thought it a psychological co-action with the change in Saturn's aspect--a change unmistakable.