Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/97

 fare, too, of our present mixed goods and passenger mail train was not altogether out of calculation, the higher speeds of the solely passenger expresses requiring more costly management and apparatus, and being thus altogether more expensive. After a good dinner on board, which is given in fair style, considering the narrow and elongated quarters stewards have to deal with in ether-ocean shipping, I retreat to my own quarters and prepare to begin my labours. But before that, I must needs allow myself just one parting glance at our cross-electric protective panoply. It surrounds us like a light but mysterious auroral mist, to protect from meteorite impact and from other space-filling dangers our slight and fragile craft. All seeming in order there, imparting a comfortable security, I take, ere turning in, just one last fond look of our retreating earth, already dwarfed by half a million miles interval, and already also somewhat out of line with our direction, through the progress meanwhile in her own orbit, as she rolls everlastingly along her grand circumsolar highway.

Let me here also glance at our accommodations, and our other navigation arrangements in general, all of which would have much amazed and perplexed our travelling forefathers of a thousand years ago. Our main cabin is, of course, perfectly air-tight; and the air-supply, at the accustomed degree of pressure, is maintained in constant purity and fulness of supply by the anticarbonic rectifiers and the oxygen reserves. But if we want perfect quiet—which was, for example, an object with myself in view of my prospective studies—we can at once completely void our little separate airtight berths, and thus, freed from sound