CXXII. Solar Treasures.

The breathless vacuum met its end, and Cookie and the mysterious man trespassed the border where the gasses of Jupiter's atmosphere and the black, freezing space met each other. Nothing but dark, orange fog could be seen as they descended, but their glide down eventually met a zone where there was a vast area —bigger than any piece of land that Cookie had ever seen back on Earth, where there was light and free space to move around.

Except that it was not any piece of land, in the literal sense of the expression. Looking down and further into the horizon, swirling clouds in tones of orange and yellow covered the bottom some 300 feet down like a real, brown territory of Earth wastelands and deserts would. All of those clouds moved to the horizon, like an endless parade of color strips, and they conjoined with more swirls of clouds above, forming pillars and supports of at least one mile of height.