Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/388

 tremely intricate problem of three separate calculus lines.

Upper is separated from Lower Solardom by a lofty wall, or cross-electric panoply, ascending perpendicularly right up to the reversal of the photosphere. This thin diaphanous aurora-looking process hardly prevents our view more than would the clearest glass, but it is an impenetrable barrier to the Lower Solars, almost as much as the solar photosphere itself. Consequently we visitors have to pass through one of the appointed gates, where an Upper Solar guard receives the intending traveller and subjects him to the calculus. This is usually a brief process, and completed in the unaided mind of the guardian; although, at times, he will not be so easily satisfied, and will take to his pencil, especially if he detects the necessity for more than one or two calculus lines. This happened just the day before our visit, with an Unmitigated Calvinist Missionary, who had come to make conversions, and who had at first aroused disturbing suspicions. But when it was found, by means of a carefully traced third calculus line, that a terrible category of ideas, lying behind the missionary's apparently placid outer expression, referred solely to the next life, the man himself being a plain well-meaning common-sense mortal as ever stepped, he was at once passed through. The sole object of the guardianship is to make sure that visitors have no mischievous or other bad or trouble-giving intentions. That being ascertained, they are perfectly free to go in and out at pleasure.

The grand dividing wall we were now approaching has a gradual self-adjusting forward movement,