"Just take our telescope and look at it," said Redgrave, pointing towards the Sun, with its little cluster of attendant planets. "It looks something like one of Jupiter's little moons down there, doesn't it, only not quite as big?"
"Yes, it does, but that doesn't matter. The fact is that it's there, and we know what it's like, and it's home, if it is a thousand million miles away, and that's everything."
By this time they had passed through the outer band of clouds. The vast, sunlit arch of the Rings towered up to the zenith, apparently spanning the whole visible heavens. Below and in front of them lay the enormous semicircle of the hemisphere which was turned towards the Sun, shrouded by its many-coloured bands of clouds. The R. Force was directed strongly against the lower ring, and the Astronef descended rapidly in a slanting direction through the cloud-bands towards the southern temperate zone of the planet.
They passed through the second, or dark, cloud-band at the rate of about three thousand miles an hour, aided by the repulsion against the Rings and the attraction of the planets, and soon after lunch, the materials of which now consented to remain on the table, they passed through the clouds and found themselves in a new world of wonders.
On a far vaster scale, it was the Earth during that period of its development which is called the Reptilian Age. The atmosphere was still dense and loaded with aqueous vapour, but the waters had already been divided from the land.
They passed over vast, marshy continents and islands, and warm seas, above which thin clouds of steam still hung, and as they swept southward with the propellers working at their utmost speed they caught glimpses of giant forms rising out of the steamy waters near the land, of others crawling slowly over it, dragging their huge bulk through a tremendous vegetation, which they crushed down as they passed, as a sheep on Earth might push its way through a field of standing corn.
Other and even stranger shapes, broad-winged and ungainly, fluttered with a slow, bat-like motion through the lower strata of the atmosphere.
Every now and then during the voyage across the temperate zone the propellers were slowed down to enable them to witness some Titanic conflict between the gigantic denizens of land and sea and air. But Zaidie had had enough of horrors on the Saturnian equator, and so she was content to watch this phase of evolution working itself out (as it had done on the Earth thousands of ages ago) from a convenient distance. Wherefore the Astronef sped on without approaching the surface nearer than was necessary to get a clear general view.
"It'll be all very nice to see and remember and dream about afterwards," she said, "but I don't think I can stand any more monsters just now, at least not at close quarters, and I'm quite sure that if those things can live there we couldn't, any more than we could have lived on Earth a million years or so ago. No, really I don't want to land, Lenox; let's go on."
They went on at a speed of about a hundred miles an hour, and, as they progressed southward, both the atmosphere and the landscape rapidly changed. The air grew clearer and the clouds lighter. Land and sea were more sharply divided, and both teeming with life. The seas still swarmed with serpentine monsters of the saurian type, and the firmer lands were peopled by huge animals, mastodons, bears, giant tapirs, mylodons, deinotheriums, and a score of other species too strange for them to recognise by any Earthly likeness, which roamed in great herds through the vast twilit forests and over boundless plains covered with grey-blue vegetation.