Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/394



Brown stood awe-struck, while I gathered myself up for the encounter. With a feeling of profound respect, which could hardly fail to appear in my looks, I asked our new friend if he would afford to us, ignorant strangers as we were, some information upon all that was around us. With a sign of assent, he answered at once, and in our telegraph language, that he would give us a few minutes. Then turning round, and pointing to what seemed to us a sort of telegraph apparatus, from which he had himself just come, and where there were still a great many looking on and apparently reading, he told us that communications were there being received from a number of systems, far and near, throughout the universe. The information appeared to us to be conveyed by a rapid succession of spectrum colours and their colour sounds, all of which rumbled in our crude ears like the mere indiscriminate hum of an Eolian harp, but which seemed to convey, with extraordinary rapidity, the most precise knowledge to the absorbed listeners before us. We were already aware, indeed, that these Upper Solars intercommunicated ideas with a rapidity almost infinitely beyond mere speech making; and that they classed us mere speechmakers as an inferior race, and more allied to anthropoids than to themselves. Although there was not a great difference in physical form between them and the Lower Solars, these Uppers, with their additional sense, and other superiorities, made out, at least, a very wide difference in mind.

Our guide next took us, after a short walk, into