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a result of the terrific heat, would dissolve into vapor. But the warmth we
now feel and which is certainly very irksome, and insufferable for any length
of time, shows that we have already sailed past the corona of the sun and have
it behind us. Had the catastrophe taken place, we should have felt nothing, so
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suddenly would it have happened. But this gradually rising heat indicates that
the
Sannah became very hot at her surface without, however, having suffered any
serious damage. Thanks to the fire-resisting casing and the thick gutta-percha
upholstering of
the rooms, the temperature in this one rose but slowly and relatively little."
"I can believe that," said Munchhausen. "Why, on all sides of us there are no
less than seven rooms, each ten feet wide, between us and the outside casing;
seven rooms with rubber-covered ceilings and floors, so that fourteen layers
protect us from the penetration of warmth, separated by
seven air-spaces, not to speak of the strong outside casing and the excellent
protective material with which Gabokol coated it."
"In any case, it is this protective casing from Eden that saved our lives,"
declared Flitmore. "No earthly material could have withstood the sun's glow."
"But isn't it possible that we may still be in the flames?" asked Heliastra.
"In that case, the heat would rise gradually and would soon become too much
for us."
"Entirely out of the question!" said Schulze. "With the terrific speed of our
journey we must long ago have left the solar corona, even before the rise in
temperature was noticeable down here."
"Then I should very respectfully like to express the modest remark," said
John, "that we go above into the fresh air, for
I am sweating, if I may be permitted to say so, like a ship's stoker."
"Patience, patience, my lad!" laughed Schulze. "I'm afraid we must endure this
just a little longer. In the first place, we are still so close to the sun
that a walk in the open is quite out of the question for the time being,
unless you want to be roasted; in the second place, the heat in the upper
chambers is undoubtedly much worse than it is down here. We must first wait
until the
Sannah has had a chance to cool off."
"Then we shall have to have a lot of patience," declared Hank, "for the sun is
so close to us that it must be burning down upon the
Sannah in a manner that doesn't bode well for a cooling off."
"In two hours," said the Englishman, "we can risk the ascent without worry. In
the first place, a relative cooling must obviously take place, since the
temperature is far greater in the corona itself than in its vicinity; in the
second
place, we are moving away from the sun at lightning speed;
in the third place, our
Sannah is revolving around herself and turns only one side towards the sun;
the side turned away from the sun will cool off very rapidly."
As it turned out, the Englishman was right; the terrific heat diminished
quickly enough and two hours later our
friends were able to mount to the Zenith room, which was turned away from the
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sun.
Out of the hatchway of the Zenith room, Flitmore went to examine how much the
casing of the
Sannah had been damaged by the journey through the glowing atmosphere of the
sun.
He found that the coating put on in Eden was entirely intact; but that the
flint glass beneath was broken through everywhere. The outside metal casing
was molten; in general it was still soft, but after leaving the solar corona
it would quickly solidify again. In some places, holes showed where the casing
had melted. But this was not disturbing, for they would not again have to go
through a similar heat,
and the protective covering supplied by Gabokol closed over the holes.
When Lord Flitmore had returned to the room, Mitzie said: "It is still a
riddle to me how we were able to pass through the flaming atmosphere of the
sun uninjured."
"It is surely a miracle of God's protection!" said her husband. "But the
natural means by which He assisted us was the enormous speed with which our
craft was moving. You yourself have found, my dear, how you can draw your
finger through the flame of a light, without injury and without even feeling
any warmth, if you do it swiftly enough. Of course, we did not stay in the
flames of the sun for quite so short a time, but surely we were not there for
more than half a minute, and our protective casing was enough to withstand
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