Page:Lieut Gullivar Jones - His Vacation - Edwin Arnold (1905).djvu/102

 hitherward; from the midst of that nucleus undescribed, undescribable, there issued presently the primeval sigh that breathed the breath of life into all things. And that sigh thrilled through the empty spaces of the illimitable: it breathed the breath of promise over the frozen hills of the outside planets where the night-frost had lasted without beginning: and the waters of ten thousand nameless oceans, girding nameless planets, were stirred, trembling into their depth. It crossed the illimitable spaces where the herding aerolites swirl forever through space in the wake of careering world, and all their whistling wings answered to it. It reverberated through the grey wastes of vacuity, and crossed the dark oceans of the Outside, even to the black shores of the eternal night beyond.

"And hardly had echo of that breath died away in the hollow of the heavens and the empty wombs of a million barren worlds, when the light brightened again, and drawing in upon itself became definite and took form, and therefrom, at the moment of primitive conception, there came"

And just then, as she had read so far as that, when all my faculties were aching to know what came next—whether this were but the idle scribbling of a vacuous fool, or something else—there rose the sound of soft flutes and tinkling bells in the corridors, as seneschals wan-