toward the sunward hemisphere.

After a long time the now broad river widened yet more until it became a
great lake, or bay. The surface of the planet around appeared nearly
level, and, as far as we could see, was mostly covered by the water. Here
vast fields of ice floated, and the water was not muddy, as it would have
been if it had passed over soil, but of crystal purity and wonderfully
blue in places where shafts of sunlight penetrated to great depths--for
now the sun was high above the horizon ahead, and shining in an almost
clear sky. Presently we began to notice the wind again. It came fitfully,
first from one quarter and then another, rapidly increasing until, at
times, it rose into a tempest. It lifted the water in huge combing waves,
but the car rode them like a lifeboat.

"There is peril for us in this," said Edmund, at last. "We are being
carried by the current into a region where the contending winds may play
havoc. It is the place where the hot air from the sunward side begins to
be chilled and to descend, meeting the colder air from the night side. It
must form a veritable belt of storms, which may be as difficult to pass,
circumstanced as we are, as the crystal mountains themselves."

"Suppose it should turn out that there is nothing but an ocean on this
side of the planet," I suggested.

"That I believe to be impossible," Edmund responded. "This hemisphere
must be, as a whole, broken up into highlands and depressions. The
geological formation of the other side, as far as I could make it out
from the appearance of the rocks in the caverns, indicates that Venus has
undergone the same experience of upheavals and fracturings of the crust
that the earth has been through. If that is true of one side it must be