nearer the earth, she could never give a light as intense as this."

As he spoke the screen of vapor was illuminated to such a degree
that the whole country was as it were bathed in twilight.
"What can this be?" soliloquized the captain. "It cannot be the sun,
for the sun set in the east only an hour and a half ago.
Would that those clouds would disclose what enormous luminary lies
behind them! What a fool I was not to have learnt more astronomy!
Perhaps, after all, I am racking my brain over something that is
quite in the ordinary course of nature."

But, reason as he might, the mysteries of the heavens still
remained impenetrable. For about an hour some luminous body,
its disc evidently of gigantic dimensions, shed its rays upon
the upper strata of the clouds; then, marvelous to relate,
instead of obeying the ordinary laws of celestial mechanism,
and descending upon the opposite horizon, it seemed to retreat
farther off, grew dimmer, and vanished.

The darkness that returned to the face of the earth was not more
profound than the gloom which fell upon the captain's soul.
Everything was incomprehensible. The simplest mechanical rules
seemed falsified; the planets had defied the laws of gravitation;
the motions of the celestial spheres were erroneous as those of a
watch with a defective mainspring, and there was reason to fear
that the sun would never again shed his radiance upon the earth.

But these last fears were groundless. In three hours' time, without any
intervening twilight, the morning sun made its appearance in
the west, and day once more had dawned. On consulting his watch,