The mysterious behaviour of the sun was a great puzzle to our
astronomer. I have said that he rose very little above the horizon, or
in other words the lip of the crater, as might be expected from our high
southern latitude; but we soon found that he always rose and sank at the
same place. In the morning he peeped above the cliffs, and in the
evening he dipped again behind them, leaving a twilight or gloaming (I
can scarcely call it dusk), which continued throughout the night. From
his fixity in azimuth, Gazen concluded that Schiaparelli, the famous
Italian observer, was right in supposing that Venus takes as long to
turn about her own axis as she does to go round the sun, and that as a
consequence she always presents the same side to her luminary. All that
we heard from the natives tended to confirm this view. They told us that
far away to the east and west of Womla there was a desert land, covered
with snow and ice, on which the sun never shone. We also gathered that
the sun rises to a greater and lesser height above the cliffs
alternately, thus producing a succession of warmer and cooler seasons; a
fact which agrees with Schiaparelli's observation that the axis of the
planet sways to and from the sun. Gazen was intensely delighted at this
discovery, partly for its own sake, but mainly, I think, because it
would afford him an opportunity of crushing the celebrated Pettifer
Possil, his professional antagonist, who, it seems, is bitterly opposed
to the doctrines of Schiaparelli. But why did the sun rise and set every
fifteen hours or thereabout, and so make what I have called a "day" and
"night"? Why did he not continue in the same spot, except for the slow
change caused by the nutation or nodding of Venus? Gazen was much
perplexed over this anomaly, and sought an explanation of it in the
refraction of the atmosphere above the cliffs producing an apparent but
not a real motion of the orb.