Page:Poet Lore, volume 4, 1892.djvu/656

 flown through a distance of about four hundred and fifty-one years. We have to travel a trifle of about 6,000,000,000,000 miles farther in order to reach the spheres of stars of the twelfth magnitude whose light needs more than four thousand years to reach the earth.”

“And is it possible to make this journey in an arbitrarily short time?” I asked, without thinking that I could not even imagine the enormous distance.

“Certainly,” my friend replied.

“But tell me, please, what wonderful motor is it that moves our machine so rapidly through the universe.”

“Later; later!” he answers; “I must manage the machine. The least fault would make us lose our balance, and we should fall.”

“Whither?” I ask.

“Do I know?”

“Let us rush on, then, as fast as we can!”

“If we are to finish our excursion in an hour, we must confine ourselves to a few more important views.”

“Speed on; speed on!” I urge him.

Again I see a wonderful but horrible panorama of strife. The scenes change rapidly, but each is very distinct. And lo! this time images of battles and skirmishes are intermingled with other scenes; but in all of them there is some struggle, in which the brutality of man’s nature is triumphing, in which sheer force or fraud and deception are gaining the victory over natural weakness or guilelessness.

Suddenly I notice that while the scene is changing, we are in darkness longer than usual.

“What’s the matter?” I ask impatiently.

“I direct the machine so that you may see the final scene. We are farther than the stars of the twelfth magnitude, in spheres whose light reaches the earth in about six thousand years. This time, however, we shall change our mode of observation. When we reach the point of view, I shall stop the machine, only allowing it to rotate, so that the scene will develop before your eye in the natural, not in the reversed, order.”