Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/347

 cessible to thought it had reached us. Now then, as through some renovated century, we flew through new cycles of heavens. At length again came a starless interval; and far longer it endured, before the beams of a starry host again had reached us.

As we thus advanced forever through an interchange of nights and solar heavens, and as the interval grew still longer and longer before the last heaven we had quitted contracted to a point,—and as once we issued suddenly from the middle of thickest night into an Aurora Borealis,—the herald of an expiring world, and we found throughout this cycle of solar systems that a day of judgment had indeed arrived; the suns had sickened, and the planets were heaving—rocking, yawning in convulsions, the subterraneous waters of the great deeps were breaking up, and lightnings that were ten diameters of a world in length ran along—from east to west—from Zenith to Nadir; and here and there, where a sun should have been, we saw instead through the misty vapor a gloomy—ashy—leaden corpse of a solar body, that sucked in flames from the perishing world—but gave out neither light nor heat; and as I saw, through a vista which had no end, mountain towering above mountain, and piled up with what seemed glittering snow from the conflict of solar and planetary bodies;—then my spirit bent under the load of the universe, and I said to the Form, "Rest, rest: and lead me no farther: I am too solitary in the creation itself; and in its deserts yet more so: the full world is great, but the empty world is greater; and with the universe increase its Zaarahs."

Then the Form touched me like the flowing of a breath, and spoke more gently than before: "In the presence of God there is no emptiness: above, below,