Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/383

 should have expected and calculated from their main physical conditions of enormous gravity, and very considerable, but irregular and intermittently disturbed sub-photospheric light and heat.

White was already quite at home with these Lower Solars, and had many a warm welcome in their genial expressions. His agent, whom White had duly signalized on his approach, was waiting at the landing, and was apparently a plain straightforward man of business. But what an odd figure! And what a change, from the slender forms of Vulcan, was the short squat mortal before us, his big broad head upon an almost inperceptibly [sic] short neck, half-buried between his shoulders, and his body as broad as it was long. His deep sepulchral voice, as he spoke to us—and, let me add, quite fluently in good English, which he had mastered for our benefit, as well as the Telegraph tongue—was yet another striking feature of the case.

We all turned out of ship, and with much curiosity wandered about in the solar scenes. The aspect of the heavens above was even more striking than the scene upon the ground below; and we were never tired of watching the sublime grandeur of the electric storms, now lowering and darkening and again breaking up, with frequent glimpses of the reverse, or lower surface, of the beautiful photosphere, with its comparatively subdued lustre, now serene, for fleeting minutes, like an upper solar sky, and again promptly disturbed by the varying electrical streams, and the violent breaches of the upward and the downward atmospheric rushes.

We had not been long ashore ere a most comic