Rhoda, meanwhile, flat on the floor, half sick from the acceleration, with her face pressed against the lower deadlight, watched the earth rush downward and away. At first she could see nothing but the dazzling cone of yellow light that shot away from them, like the tail of a great rocket, but presently, by partially shielding her eyes with her hand, she was able to discover a great and ever widening ring of yellow dust, with riffles of light and shade chasing each other outward, and, in the middle, a maelstrom of earth and shattered timbers. Then she saw that the lights of the city and of the neighboring towns seemed to be flowing in from all sides to a point just below her. "Twenty thousand feet!" yelled Burke, shouting out the readings of the manometer as they rose. "Thirty thousand!" Hooker crawled along the floor to her side, and she clutched his hand. "Oh, Bennie," she exclaimed, "it's perfectly wonderful! But I'm scared almost to death." With his head close to hers, he looked down into the black void at the retreating earth. "Sixty thousand!" sang out Burke. The lights of Washington had now fused into a pale-yellow, phosphorescent spot. A silver thread showed where flowed the Potomac, and, off to the north, another path of luminous haze--Baltimore--was gradually crawling in toward the first, and still farther off a third and fourth--Wilmington and Philadelphia. The surface of the earth in the moonlight had taken on a frosty, bluish tinge, while, from the east, a darker shade was drawing in like a curtain--the sea. "Ninety thousand; nearly twenty miles up--and running like a watch!" chirruped Burke. A few minutes, and the whole Atlantic seaboard was spread out below them--New York, with its more congested illumination, glowing like a planet. The whole mass of the globe's surface gradually came into view as the Ring drove up and out of the earth's atmosphere, the mountain ranges shining like necklaces of jewels and the Great Lakes showing as darker patches, while everything else remained misty and obscured as by a dense haze. "One hundred and fifty thousand!" intoned Burke. "The manometer no longer registers. We shall be out of the atmosphere presently. We're getting into space!" For a while, they remained silent. Then Bennie and Rhoda noticed that the helium blast from the tractor had diminished in intensity, assuming a pale straw-color, and its roar had subsided to a faint and scarcely audible purr. "What's happened?" she asked nervously. "Are we running down?" "No," Bennie replied; "we're getting out into the ether. There is no air to oppose the radiant discharge or to transmit the sound. But you feel the drag, don't you? That shows that the tractor is still giving the same lift." "How fast are we going now?" she asked in awe. Bennie glanced at his watch. "It's just twenty minutes since we started. We must be doing about twelve thousand feet a second, and are probably well over a thousand miles from the earth already."