Once I flew back to the fire. I could not get very close to it, for the air choked me. The fire seemed to be burning itself out. It was dull, with flickering puffs of flame in the midst of a thick pall of smoke which hung motionless in the still air.
I returned to Nona.
“The fire-monster is dying,” I said. “But it has eaten our cave.”
I know now what was happening. The fire was being smothered for lack of fresh air to sustain its combustion. Had there been any wind I do not doubt but that the entire surface of the meteor would have been consumed.
An almost equally great danger threatened us, however—and presently we were made aware of it. The smothering, smouldering fire gave off steadily a tremendous volume of unconsumed gases. Even without any wind they diffused themselves throughout the meteor’s atmosphere, it was so small a world, with so thin a blanket of air about it—an infinitesimal fraction of the air that envelopes your Earth. Rapidly it became polluted with poisonous gases from the half-smothered fire—polluted throughout its entire extent.
For a day we were uneasy. Then we grew frightened. There was little evidence of smoke—only a blue haze. But the air seemed to choke us. It was the poisonous breath of the fire-monster come to make us sick.
We tried to go somewhere to escape it. But we were on the opposite side of the world from it already, and no matter which direction we took, inevitably we approached it.
Except upward. We tried higher altitudes. The air was purer up there, but also it was thinner, and we could not live in it for any length of time. Nor could we sustain ourselves aloft indefinitely—to say nothing of sleeping and eating.
Once in desperation we tried swimming off the meteor into Space. But the lack of any breathable air at all soon brought us struggling downward.