the handle that acted as a helm to the vessel. For the last ten
minutes they had been shooting downwards into great cracks and
caverns of cloud. Now, through a sort of purple haze, could be
seen comparatively near to them what seemed to be the upper part
of a huge, dark orb or sphere, islanded in a sea of cloud. The
Professor's eyes were blazing like a maniac's.

"It is a new world," he cried, with a dreadful mirth. "It is a
new planet and it shall bear my name. This star and not that
other vulgar one shall be 'Lucifer, sun of the morning.' Here we
will have no chartered lunacies, here we will have no gods. Here
man shall be as innocent as the daisies, as innocent and as
cruel--here the intellect----"

"There seems," said Michael, timidly, "to be something sticking
up in the middle of it."

"So there is," said the Professor, leaning over the side of the
ship, his spectacles shining with intellectual excitement. "What
can it be? It might of course be merely a----"

Then a shriek indescribable broke out of him of a sudden, and he
flung up his arms like a lost spirit. The monk took the helm in a
tired way; he did not seem much astonished for he came from an
ignorant part of the world in which it is not uncommon for lost
spirits to shriek when they see the curious shape which the
Professor had just seen on the top of the mysterious ball, but he
took the helm only just in time, and by driving it hard to the
left he prevented the flying ship from smashing into St. Paul's
Cathedral.