Chapter 10: Changing Landscapes

On reaching the Callisto, Ayrault worked the lock he had had placed on the lower door, which, to avoid carrying a key, was opened by a combination. The car’s interior was exactly as they had left it, and they were glad to be in it again.

“Now,” said Bearwarden, “we can have a sound and undisturbed sleep, which is what I want more than anything else. No prowlers can trouble us here, and we shall not need the protection-wires.”

They then opened a window in each side--for the large glass plates, admitting the sun when closed, made the Callisto rather warm--and placed a stout wire netting within them to keep out birds and bats, and then, though it was but little past noon, got into their comfortable beds and slept nine hours at a stretch. Their strong metal house was securely at rest, receiving the sunlight and shedding the rain and dew as it might have done on earth. No winds or storms, lightnings or floods, could trouble it, while the multiformed monsters of antiquity and mythology restored in life, with which the terrestrials had been thrown into such close contact, roamed about its polished walls. Not even the fiercest could affect them, and they would but see themselves reflected in any vain assaults. The domed symmetrical cylinder stood there as a monument to human ingenuity and skill, and the travellers’ last thought as they fell asleep was, “Man is really lord of creation.”

The following day at about noon they awoke, and had a bath in the warm pool. They saw the armoured mass of the great ant evidently undisturbed, while the bodies of its victims were already shining skeletons, and raised a small cairn of stones in memory of the struggle they had had there.

“We should name this place Kentucky,” said Bearwarden, “for it is indeed a dark and bloody ground,” and, seeing the aptness of the appellation, they entered it so on their charts. While Ayrault got the batteries in shape for resuming work. Bearwarden prepared a substantial breakfast. This consisted of oatmeal and cream kept hermetically sealed in glass, a dish of roast grouse, coffee, pilot bread, a bottle of Sauterne, and another of Rhine wine.

“This is the last meal we shall take hereabouts,” said their cook, as they plied their knives and forks beneath the trees, “so here is a toast to our adventures, and to all the game we have killed.” They drained their glasses in drinking this, after which Bearwarden regaled them with the latest concert-hall song which he had at his tongue’s end.

About an hour before dark they re-entered their projectile, and, as a mark of respect to their little ship, named the great branch of the continent on which they had alighted Callisto Point. They then got under way. The batteries had to develop almost their maximum power to overcome Jupiter’s attraction; but they were equal to the task, and the Callisto was soon in the air. Directing their apergy to the mountains towards the interior of the continent, and applying repulsion to any ridge or hill over which they passed, thereby easing the work of the batteries engaged in supporting the Callisto, they were soon sweeping along at seventy-five to one hundred miles an hour. By keeping the projectile just strongly enough charged to neutralize gravitation, they remained for the most part within two hundred feet of the ground, seldom rising to an altitude of more than a mile, and were therefore able to keep the windows at the sides open and so obtain an unobstructed view. If, however, at any time they felt oppressed by Jupiter’s high barometric pressure, and preferred the terrestrial conditions, they had but to rise till the barometer fell to thirty. Then, if an object of interest recalled them to sea-level, they could keep the Callisto’s inside pressure at what they found on the Jovian mountains, by screwing up the windows. On account of the distance of sixty-four thousand miles from Jupiter’s equator to the pole, they calculated that going at the speed of a hundred miles an hour, night and day, it would take them twenty-five terrestrial days to reach the pole even from latitude two degrees at which they started. But they knew that, if pressed for time, they could rise above the limits of the atmosphere, and move with planetary speed; while, if they wished a still easier method of pursuing their observation, they had but to remain poised between the sun and Jupiter, beyond the latter’s upper air, and photograph or map it as it revolved before them.

By sunset they had gone a hundred miles. Wishing to push along, they closed the windows, rose higher to avoid any mountain-tops that might be invisible in the moonlight, and increased their speed. The air made a gentle humming sound as they shot through it, and towards morning they saw several bright points of light in which they recognized, by the aid of their glasses, sheets of flame and torrents of molten glowing lava, bursting at intervals or pouring steadily from several volcanoes. From this they concluded they were again near an ocean, since volcanoes need the presence of a large body of water to provide steam for their eruptions.

With the rising sun they found the scene of the day before entirely changed. They were over the shore of a vast ocean that extended to the left as far as they could see, for the range of vision often exceeded the power of sight. The coast-line ran almost due north and south, while the volcanoes that dotted it, and that had been luminous during the night, now revealed their nature only by lines of smoke and vapours. They were struck by the boldness and abruptness of the scenery. The mountains and cliffs had been but little cut down by water and frost action, and seemed in the full vigour of their youth, which was what the travellers had a right to expect on a globe that was still cooling and shrinking, and consequently throwing up ridges in the shape of mountains far more rapidly than a planet as matured and quiescent as the earth. The absence of lakes also showed them that there had been no Glacial period, in the latitudes they were crossing, for a very long time.

“We can account for the absence of ice-action and scratches,” said Cortlandt, “in one of two ways. Either the proximity of the internal heat to the surface prevents water from freezing in all latitudes, or Jupiter’s axis has always been very nearly perpendicular to its orbit, and consequently the thermometer has never been much below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit; for, at the considerable distance we are now from the sun, it is easy to conceive that, with the axis much inclined, there might be cold weather, during the Northern hemisphere’s winter, that would last for about six of our years, even as near the equator as this. The substantiation of an ice-cap at the pole will disprove the first hypothesis; for what we took for ice before alighting may have been but banks of cloud, since, having been in the plane of the planet’s equator at the time, we had naturally but a very oblique view of the poles; while the absence of glacial scratches shows, I take it, that though the axis may have been a good deal more inclined than at present, it has not, at all events since Jupiter’s Palaeozoic period, been as much so as that of Uranus or Venus. The land on Jupiter, corresponding to the Laurentian Hills on earth, must even here have appeared at so remote a period that the first surface it showed must long since have been worn away, and therefore any impressions it received have also been erased.