surface; and the horizon therefore seemed to be not very far from my
own level, while the point below me, of course, appeared at a vast
distance. The appearance of the surface, therefore, was as if the
horizon had been, say, some thirty miles higher than the centre of the
semicircle bounding my view, and the area included in my prospect had
the form of a saucer or shallow bowl. But since the diameter of the
visible surface increases only as the square root of the height, this
appearance became less and less perceptible as I rose higher. It had
taken me twenty minutes to attain the elevation of thirty-five miles;
but my speed was, of course, constantly increasing, very much as the
speed of an object falling to the Earth from a great height increases;
and before ten more minutes had elapsed, I found myself surrounded by
a blackness nearly absolute, except in the direction of the
Sun,--which was still well above the sea--and immediately round the
terrestrial horizon, on which rested a ring of sunlit azure sky,
broken here and there by clouds. In every other direction I seemed to
be looking not merely upon a black or almost black sky, but into close
surrounding darkness. Amid this darkness, however, were visible
innumerable points of light, more or less brilliant--the stars--which
no longer seemed to be spangled over the surface of a distant vault,
but rather scattered immediately about me, nearer or farther to the
instinctive apprehension of the eye as they were brighter or fainter.
Scintillation there was none, except in the immediate vicinity of the
eastern horizon, where I still saw them through a dense atmosphere. In
short, before thirty minutes had elapsed since the start, I was
satisfied that I had passed entirely out of the atmosphere, and had
entered into the vacancy of space--if such a thing as vacant space
there be.

At this point I had to cut off the greater part of the apergy and