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Slowly the light crept over the planet's surface until the huge illuminated sphere, almost filling the entire heavens, made a scene of the most exquisite grandeur that human eyes have ever beheld. "Dearest!"

As it rose, the sky turned dark and the sun's brilliant disk, far too bright to be looked at with unshielded eyes, became a blazing furnace that could roast unshielded flesh. Stars appeared, shining myriads despite the sun, with every one vivid against a background of black. The planet's surface became a half-ball, of which a part lay in darkness.

The result might then be that, as in the case of the earth, the continuous inpour of the fresh matter first heated, and later on liquefied the greater part of it as well perhaps as a thin layer of the planet's original surface; so that when in due course the whole of the meteor-swarm had been captured, Mars had acquired its present mass, but would consist of an intensely heated, and either liquid or plastic thin outer shell resting upon a cold and solid interior.

"You see," Ayrault explained, "on Jupiter we shall need our apergetic outfits to enable us to make long marches, while on Saturn they will not be necessary, the increase in our weight as a result of that planet's size being considerably less than the usual load carried by the Roman soldier."

With a magnifying power of 300 the polar spots of Mars were distinctly visible and perfectly defined. They were, I thought, less white than they appeared from the Earth, but their colour was notably different from that of the planet's general surface, differing almost as widely from the orange hue of what I supposed to be land as from the greyish blue of the water.

The government of Kandar was not one of great pomp and display. There was a king, to be sure, but nobody could imagine the perspiringly earnest King Humphrey the Eighth as a tyrant. There were titles, it was true, but they were life appointments to the planet's legislative Upper House. Kandar was a tranquil, quaint, and very happy world. There were few industries, and those were small.

That, just as the body takes up the fact of the bruised lung into its own general consciousness, lifting it thereby from the submerged, unrealized state; and just as our human consciousness can be caught up again as a part of the earth's; so, in turn, the Planet's own vast personality is included in the collective consciousness of the entire Universe all steps and stages of advance to that final and august Consciousnss of which they are fragments, projections, manifestations in Time GOD.

Lowell noticed a kind of veil partially obscuring the markings, and which he ascribed, no doubt correctly, to the planet's atmosphere. But he thinks that, notwithstanding the atmospheric veil, the markings noted by him were unquestionably permanent features of the planet's real surface.

Had there been time, Odin might have grudgingly given Grim Hagen a few kind words for the work he had done and the tribute he had paid Maya. The best of a planet's treasures and art had been brought here. But all he could see was Maya, lying upon a golden, diamond-set couch. A silk embroidered coverlet was drawn over her, and it too seemed to have been spun from moonbeams. She looked no older.

It is manifest that all these considerations point to the conclusion that the dark ring is a new formation, or, at the least, that it has changed notably in condition during the present century. I have hitherto only considered the appearance of the dusky ring as seen on either side of the planet's globe within the bright rings.