A Journey in Other Worlds by John Jacob Astor IV

Having returned the rugs to the Callisto, they applied the maximum power of the batteries to rising, closed all openings when the barometer registered thirty, and moved off into space. When Several thousand miles above the pole, they diverted part of the power to attracting the nearest moon that was in the plane of Jupiter's equator, and by the time their upward motion had ceased were moving well in its direction. Their rapid motion aided the work of resisting gravity, since their car had in fact become a small moon, revolving, like those of Uranus or that of Neptune, in an orbit varying greatly from the plane of the ecliptic. As they flew south at a height ranging from two thousand to three thousand miles, the planet revolved before them, and they had a chance of obtaining a thorough view. There were but a few scattered islands on the side of the Northern hemisphere opposite to that over which they had reached the pole, and in the varying colours of the water, which they attributed to temperature or to some substance in solution, they recognized what they had always heard described on earth as the bands of Jupiter, encircling the planet with great belts, the colour varying with the latitude. At about latitude forty-five these bands were purple, farther south light olive green, and at the equator a brown orange. Shortly after they swung across the equator the ocean again became purple, and at the same time a well-defined and very brilliant white spot came into view. Its brightness showed slight variations in intensity, though its general shape remained unchanged. It had another peculiarity, in that it possessed a fairly rapid motion of its own, as it moved eastward across the surface of the ocean. It exhibited all the phenomena of the storm they had watched in crossing Secretary Deepwaters Bay, but covered a larger area, and was far more violent. Their glasses showed them vast sheets of spray driven along at tremendous speed, while the surface was milky white.

"This," said Bearwarden, picking up a book, "solves to my mind the mystery of the white spot described by the English writer Chambers, in 1889, as follows: