Every instant I expected to hear the fatal intelligence that our descent had begun.
"Strange!" muttered Gazen by-and-by, as if speaking to himself.
"What is strange?"
"We are neither rising nor falling now. We don't seem to move."
"Impossible!"
"Nevertheless, it's a fact," he exclaimed at the end of some minutes. "The focus of the telescope is constant. We are evidently standing still."
His words sounded like a reprieve to a condemned man on the morning of his execution, and in the revulsion of my feeling I shouted,
"Hurrah!"
"What can it mean?" cried Gazen.
"Simply this," said I joyfully. "We have reached the 'dead-point,' where the attraction of Mercury on the car is balanced by the attraction of the sun. It can't be anything else."