It was discovered that the rarer metals terrelium and aquelium developed in contact, without salts or acids, enormous currents of magnicity without polarization or the development of gases. These metallic cells would run without attention or maintenance exerting magnic action, and could be stopped or started at any time without corrosion of metals or loss of energy, like the electric batteries on the outer sphere, but infinitely more powerful.
Aerial navigation was one of the great institutions of Atvatabar, and the goddess' yacht was only one of many thousand aerial ships that carried passengers, mails and light freight to and from every part of the country.
On such a machine as this we purposed travelling a distance of one thousand miles.
Five hundred miles west of Calnogor lay a range of lofty mountains, whose peaks pierced the upper strata of cold air. This region was the breeding-place of fearful storms that occasionally vexed the otherwise placid climate of the country.
Westward of the mountains, an elevated prairie or tableland extended for five hundred miles further, broken here and there into crevasses and cañons, the beds of mighty rivers. Beyond the prairie an irregular agglomeration of mountains and valleys stretched five hundred miles further until the ocean was reached which formed the western boundary of Atvatabar.
Egyplosis, or the sacred palace, stood on an island in a lake lying in a romantic valley of the central plateau, one thousand miles west of Calnogor. This was the destination of the Aeropher, the goddess making a special visitation to the palace of hopeless love.
No journey could have begun with better auspices than ours. We soared up the grand divide, underneath the brilliant sun, which threw the moving shadow of the ship on the earth beneath.
The Gleroseral.
Captain Lavornal, the inventor of the Aeropher, was resolved to outdo all former records in aerial navigation, and accordingly drove the Aeropher at a speed of eighty miles an hour.