We tied up, as my attendant playfully called our resting, so near the planet that I could know—I will not say see and hear, but apprehend—all that was going on in that remote sphere; remote, as we who live in what we have been used to consider the centre of the rational universe regard it. What struck me at once was the deadness of everything I looked upon. Dead, uniform color of surface and surrounding atmosphere. Dead complexion of all the inhabitants. Dead-looking trees, dead-looking grass, no flowers to be seen anywhere.
“What is the meaning of all this?” I said to my guide.
She smiled good-naturedly, and replied, “It is a forlorn home for anything above a lichen or a toadstool; but that is no wonder, when you know what the air is which they breathe. It is pure nitrogen.”
The Professor spoke up. “That can't be, madam,” he said. “The spectroscope shows the atmosphere of Saturn to be—no matter, I have forgotten what; but it was not pure nitrogen, at any rate.”
Number Five is never disconcerted. “Will you tell me,” she said, “where you have found any account of the bands and lines in the spectrum of dream-nitrogen? I should be so pleased to become acquainted with them.”
The Professor winced a little, and asked Delilah, the handmaiden, to pass a plate of muffins to him. The dream had carried him away, and he thought for the moment that he was listening to a scientific paper.
Of course, my companion went on to say, the bodily constitution of the Saturnians is wholly different from that of air-breathing, that is oxygen-breathing, human beings. They are the dullest, slowest, most torpid of mortal creatures.
All this is not to be wondered at when you remember the inert characteristics of nitrogen. There are in some localities natural springs which give out slender streams of oxygen. You will learn by and by what use the Saturnians make of this dangerous gas, which, as you recollect, constitutes about one fifth of your own atmosphere. Saturn has large lead mines, but no other metal is found on this planet. The inhabitants have nothing else to make tools of, except stones and shells. The mechanical arts have therefore made no great progress among them. Chopping down a tree with a leaden axe is necessarily a slow process.
So far as the Saturnians can be said to have any pride in anything, it is in the absolute level which characterizes their political and social order. They profess to be the only true republicans in the solar system. The fundamental articles of their Constitution are these:
All Saturnians are born equal, live equal, and die equal.