Had the voyage ended here the results would have been worth all the trouble and risk, for the solar corona, and chromosphere or sierra, had once and for all time given up their secrets. Having gone through these, the travellers came to the ‘photosphere,’ which, when seen from Earth, defines to the eye the extent of the sun’s disc. This was, in reality, a sea of white-hot fire, or lava, so fierce that the liquid was thin as spirit, and the ‘waves,’ ‘granules,’ ‘willow-leaves,’ or ‘rice-grains,’ to which various astronomers have referred, were actually the rippling waves of the fiery, solar sea, the ‘photosphere’ through which no instrument known on Earth has power to penetrate, and so white and blinding is the glare of it, that only those instruments of very high power can clearly distinguish the ‘rice-grains,’ which are accompanied by myriads of dark spots, called ‘pores,’ these being merely the shadows between the ‘rice-grains’; the latter in a constant state of ‘boil,’ caused by portions being heated from the under-source and, increasing in volume, becoming specifically lighter and rushing upwards to a higher plane to which they carry much of their newly acquired temperature, their tops, or crests, glowing; whilst the portions of the sea which surrounded them sink into the cavities they left behind when they were projected upward, these also to be heated and again to return, their cooler portions and return showing as ‘pores.’ The intense energy and rapidity with which these convection currents take place are so awful in their fierceness that the human mind can form no idea of what gas, vapour and energy on the sun really are. Solar vapour is certainly millions of times more powerful than a terrestrial solid, and the greatest conceivable crash of impact of Earth-solid would not be anything near so violent as the tiniest spray of solar vapour, and in addition to this lightning-like, irresistible surge, there are portions of the solar sea where, either through the extra refractibility, or the union of some explosive gases, the liquid remains quiescent, or rather in a state of quiet ebullition, when, with a terrific report, it suddenly bursts, shooting upwards in a spray of white-hot foam, for hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles into the atmosphere. And there follows terrible flaming and explosive vapour, which spreads upwards and around, exploding and lighting other units of similar gas here, there, and everywhere, till the whole atmosphere to the horizon, and upwards as far as the clouds and flames will allow the sight to penetrate, is one deafening, exploding mass, as if some giant insect had rushed into a flame and the fierce heat caused the sudden expansion of its moisture to burst it, and the now dismembered creature had been flung screeching and flaming to the four winds of heaven, or as if some mighty bomb had been flung into and devastated hell.