Page:Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.djvu/425

Rh way, and they occupied an elongated hollow space. Then again bisecting themselves, they further lengthened the path. After ten thousand years they began to exert their energies in the transverse directions of that path, and thus widened it. The race then began to form chambers, each for himself, into which he might retire for abstruse calculations, the nature of which seemed almost beyond the remotest reach of utility, although not beyond the power of the Analytical Engine. Thus vast cities, as it were, became formed, penetrating in every direction through solid space.

(d.) After millions of years of industry quietness and calculations, a most extraordinary catastrophe occurred. It was with the greatest difficulty that I could discover its nature, or how to explain it in ordinary language. The nearest approach I can make towards its explanation is this:—It seemed, from what my spiritual informant communicated, that the whole universe was lifted up bodily, and then borne rapidly back with a great shock, thus disarranging everything, and destroying millions of their race.

But the most incomprehensible part of this historic narration was, that on the survivors recovering their senses, they found that everything which had formerly been on their right hand was now on their left. They also observed, to their still greater dismay, that every abode in the universe was turned topsy-turvy, so that the surviving philosophers, who had retired to their attics to study, suddenly found themselves in their cellars.

I have conveyed, as carefully as the nature of the subject admits, the impressions this relation made upon me, sometimes assisted in my slow apprehensions by another unembodied Spirit, whom, to distinguish from the relator, I shall call Mathesis.