"A Voyage to Sfanomoë" by Clark Ashton Smith

consanguinity: relationship by descent from a common ancestor

diluvial: relating to a flood or floods, especially the Biblical flood.

telluric: of the earth as a planet

eventide: evening

lustrum: a period of 5 years

manumission: the act of freeing enslaved people by their enslavers

lambence: this doesn't seem to be a real word, but obviously is derived from lambent, which means of light or fire, glowing, gleaming or flickering with a soft radiance

evanish: to vanish or disappear

ermine: a type of stoat which has a white winter coat. When white, the fur historically was used for the trim of garments. In heraldry, ermine is a fur represented as black spots on a white ground, as a heraldic tincture. So what we get from this is that their beards were turning white.

calyx: the sepals of a flower, typically forming a whorl that encloses the petals and forms a protective layer around a flower in bud

orchidaceous: relating to or denoting plants of the orchid family

The picture used was generated via nightcafe. This is the first time I've gotten a usable image from AI generated art. Huzzah!

To follow along: http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/237/a-voyage-to-sfanomo%C3%AB

It's an interesting imagining of another planet before our exploration of the solar system took away all the wonder, but I do feel like this story is on the weak side. But others may find more enjoyment in it than I did. It certainly is fanciful. And there is some nice world-building elements to it on the Atlantis front.

Some rather nice catches though for imagining space travel well so long before it could be a reality, perceiving the need for artificial gravity, and heat. This despite relying on the ether theory of space. But then also some big misses - no thought of a spacesuit or other protective gear, for example. I'm unclear on the notion of solidified air. Compressed air, yes, but turning earth's atmospheric air into a solid? That's be a neat trick! More likely, you take each of the constituent gases and store them independently, probably as liquids rather an solids (liquid nitrogen, for example, is already insanely cold, and you rarely see it as a solid), and mix them together in the needed proportions as required.

I do like that they came up with a sphere for a ship design. Their reason for it is not very convincing, but a sphere with thrusters in every direction, and potentially weapons in every direction, would be vastly more flexible that a ship with one thruster in one direction, and most weapons oriented in that same direction. There's no reason to build a space ship like you would an atmospheric aeroplane, you don't have the same constraints in space as you do in an atmosphere. A sphere shaped space ship does make a lot of sense for a lot of reason!

Of course, it does beg the question why they had to leave the planet when there were other continents right here on earth that weren't being destroyed (which they observed and identified as they were traveling away from earth), that they could more easily have sailed or flown to and presumably been just fine.

And then why just two guys going together? You aren't going to found a new civilization with just two elderly brothers for your starting stock :-P Not that it mattered in the end, but clearly they didn't care about preserving the Atlantean stock, they just wanted to satisfy their own curiosity about another planet. Bleh.