A VOYAGE TO THE SUN. 55 



round us, seemed hushed, by comparison, into perfect 

 stillness. X. was the first to see the meaning of the 

 phenomenon. These sounds were those produced during 

 the explosion which had ceased some time before ; the 

 interval which had elapsed corresponding to the vast 

 distance which still separated us from the scene of the 

 outburst. Just as a perceptible interval elapses be- 

 tween the flash of a gun and the moment when the 

 noise of the discharge reaches the ear of a distant 

 observer, so in the present case a comparatively long 

 interval elapsed before the sound-waves traversed the 

 distance which light had traversed in less than a 

 second. 



As we approached the scene of the outburst, we per- 

 ceived that we were nearing the borders of an enormous 

 region which seemed dark by comparison with the 

 intense brilliancy of the rest of the photosphere. The 

 faculse, forming here immense ridge-like waves, pre- 

 vented us for a time from fully discerning the nature of 

 this region ; but after we had passed some of the loftiest 

 of these seeming waves, we could perceive that the 

 dark region formed a sort of lagoon, though of an 

 extent exceeding the whole surface of the earth. We 

 had, in fact, approached one of those regions which 

 terrestrial observers call spots. We could readily 

 infer that the spot was not one of the very largest ; in 

 fact, it was little more than twenty thousand miles in 

 width. We found that (as astronomers have inferred) 

 the dark region lay below the general level of the 

 photosphere. But terrestrial observers have wholly 



