Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/378

 one was on the alert for the grand and the terrible, and all the novelties in store for us. I marked White's coolness. He put us up to speed almost at once, pulling the second and third electrics consecutively, ere we were a good fifty and a hundred thousand miles, respectively, outside of Vulcan. So on we flew, expecting to enter the coronal outskirts within five hours. And so we did. Of course our shades were all up, and we could thus gaze harmlessly upon the growing magnificence of the sun's contour, until at length its vast expanse was too great for grasp of eye. Just then a peculiar agitation around us, and a slightly pinkish hue in our rear, told that we had already passed the coronal outskirts, and entered within the hydrogen flames of the solar atmosphere.

There is no difficulty, and no danger whatever, nowadays, in steering through these flames, terrible as they look at a distance, seeing they are perfectly amenable to the powers of our cross-electro protectors. The chief danger to us, in the solar approaches, arises from, on the one hand, the frequent ejection of hot solid or liquid materials, and, on the other, the circulating meteoric bodies, which are ever falling into the sun's photosphere. As regards this latter danger, we have to adopt our accommodating slanting method of motion, as with the many little planetoids, although with not always the same success, seeing that these solar meteorites, although mostly, are not always running in the same direction. In the other case, again, the momentum of some large masses might possibly exceed the force