Hell for Scientists

I had at one time a very bad fever of which I almost died. In my fever I had a long consistent delirium. I dreamt that I was in Hell, and that Hell is a place full of all those happenings that are improbable but not impossible. The effects of this are curious. Some of the damned, when they first arrive below, imagine that they will beguile the tedium of eternity by games of cards. But they find this impossible, because, whenever a pack is shuffled, it comes out in perfect order, beginning wit...

 Venus is Hell

Venus thus seems to be a place quite different from the Earth, and alarmingly unappealing: Broiling temperatures, crushing pressures, noxious and corrosive gases, sulfurous smells, and a landscape immersed in a ruddy gloom. Curiously enough, there is a place astonishingly like this in the superstition, folklore and legends of men. We call it Hell. In the older belief – that of the Greeks, for example – it was the place where all human souls journeyed after death. In Christian times it ha...