Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/324

 a good position. Before me was a long, narrow, boat-shaped, slightly-made vessel, wholly covered in like a tight cabin, and, as was explained to us, perfectly air-tight. By an ingenious arrangement, the cabin remained air-tight, even with free ingress and egress. This was soon to be put to proof, after quitting our atmosphere; for then there was no longer air pressure outside to balance that within the cabin, so that any chink, however small, would prove fatal to retention of the inside air. Of course, there was ever the possible fracture of the fabric by any passing meteorite or other discourteous fellow-traveller encountered in outside space, in case our earlier precautions as to these encounters proved inadequate. Towards obviating all such possible accidents, each traveller, on this occasion, was separately provided with his own independent air-breathing head-gear. Indeed, it is not, even now, deemed safe to dispense with this contingent safeguard. Inside the cabin, the air was kept pure by the usual carbon-absorbents, which we are so familiar with in ordinary ventilation, and by a store of cross-electro consolidated oxygen.

But the great marvel of the case was the cross-electro apparatus, alike for protection and locomotion. We all gazed curiously at a slight, hardly perceptible, aurora-looking mist or haze that surrounded the vessel; and, at the same time, we could just discern the outline of the long electro-line that had already been thrown out and happily anchored to the moon; thus allowing of the proposed voyage being effected with more general certainty, more celerity, and at much less energy-expenditure, than by the alternative course of simple cross-electric projection from our