midday sun
Just a trifle less than seventy-two hours after our departure into the sands of the Sahara , we broke through the surface of Pellucidar . Fortune once again favored me by the slightest of margins , for when I opened the door in the prospector 's outer jacket I saw that we had missed coming up through the bottom of an ocean by but a few hundred yards . The aspect of the surrounding country was entirely unfamiliar to me -- I had no conception of precisely where I was upon the one hundred and twenty-four million square miles of Pellucidar 's vast land surface . The perpetual midday sun poured down its torrid rays from zenith , as it had done since the beginning of Pellucidarian time -- as it would continue to do to the end of it . Before me , across the wide sea , the weird , horizonless seascape folded gently upward to meet the sky until it lost itself to view in the azure depths of distance far above the level of my eyes . How strange it looked ! How vastly different from the flat and puny area of the circumscribed vision of the dweller upon the outer crust !