Page:Weird Tales v02n04 (1923-11).djvu/16

Rh The crescent broadened, in what seemed a time incredibly short-though my chronometric sense had, as it were, been knocked into a cocked hat-there was no longer a crescent earth but a half earth hanging there below us, the terminator stretching across the vast and lonely wastes of the Pacific.

It would be difficult to decide what was the most salient thing in that stupendous view of our earth; but certainly nothing was more striking, at any rate to me, than its dominant color-a blue that was almost an azure.

Nor did this beautiful color fade away with distance. For it is a strange fact (as a study made at the Lowell Observatory on the earth-light sent to the moon had shown) that our earth shines among the starry hosts with a bluish light. And yet, when you think of it, it is not a strange thing, either; the planets have each its distinctive-its jewel-color; for instance, Venus is a dazzling white, Mars is red, while Uranus is sea-green.

The earth, as the Hornet swung between it and the sun, became gibbous and waxed to the full.

There, unmistakable as though laid down on map or library globe-though not, by the way, on the confounded Mercator projection, which distorts the earth's features out of all likeness to the reality-was visible that hemisphere from about midway the Pacific Ocean to Africa and Europe. There, in the west, the dawn was shaking its soft, light over the calm solitudes of nature and the proud and troubled cities of mankind.

It was some little time after this that St. Cloud made his discovery, a discovery which will possess great interest for earth's astronomers-that is, if they ever hear of it. Perhaps, however, this St. Cloudian discovery will have to await "confirmation elsewhere" before incorporation with the body of astronomic fact.

"By Jo!" St. Cloud suddenly ex- claimed. "Look at that!"

"What now?" asked Henry Quainfan, moving to St. Cloud's window.

"Look at the moon-look at that lunar corona."

Henry made an exclamation.

"So she's got an atmosphere after all!"

"Seems to be the nearest thing to an airy nothing possible, though-more attenuated, it looks, than a comet's caudal appendage."

"Yes," said Henry. "Things, though, are not always what they seem. But look at those stars shining through it."

As he spoke I saw it; the stars, as I soon made out, were shining through that faint nebulosity with no diminution whatever of brightness-unless, indeed, it was those stars at the satellite's limb.

A photograph of the solar corona (that beautiful mystery of which virtually no more is known by scientists today than in the time of Philostratus and Plutarch) will give a good idea of what we saw-a phenomenon rendered forever invisible to the inhabitants of the earth by the earth's luminous atmosphere. Allowance, however, must be made for the exceeding faintness of the lunar glory.

Then, when the Hornet had sped some thousands of miles farther on its journey, came another discovery, made by Henry Quainfan; the earth too has its corona. As seen from space, it is not surrounded by a thin atmospheric shell, but by a mystic pearly glory extending for thousands of miles out into space.

The coronal extension is greatest at the equator, and at the poles are faint rifts (like those in the solar halo) for all the world like magnetic lines of force.

The light I have called pearly, and yet I don't know whether that is really the right word or not. It is a thing of strange, ghostly beauty, fading away so imperceptibly that the eye endeavors in vain to trace its boundary. Also, unaccountable changes in form and extension, some of them incredibly rapid, are seen in it.

At length I turned my eyes from Terra and gazed out into the starry deeps. For here where there is no night (or day either for that matter) the stars are visible forever. There, separated from my hand only by the thickness of that diaphanous disk, was space itself-space, of which the wisest scientist (with his hypothetical ether and other postulates re- markable) knows nothing, save this: though it looks like nothing, yet it must be something.

For my part, at no time during our long journey could I bring myself to see that space was anything-though, for- sooth, I knew that it couldn't be nothing. Just the same, however, it was nothing-how in the Universe could it be anything? And those awful velvety deeps of nothing crushed my soul into infinitesimalness with their placid, un- changing terribleness. One can not, I believe, imagine the terrible thing that is in that abyss of space; one must see it to know. And no man on earth ever has seen it.

On and on dashed this mysterious thing that was now our world, and ever the earth with her attendant orb (which, too, at length became full) showed a diminution of magnitude and surface detail.

Came the time when they were no longer to be looked for below but over- head; the earth (at the distance of one hundred and sixty thousand miles) had lost her hold on us, the sun's pull was now the dominant one, and the floor of the Hornet was sunward.

St. Cloud was the first to succumb to sleep, and I followed. At that time the earth was about a million miles distant- presenting a disk about the size of the moon's as seen in the terrestrial heavens.

To my surprise, as I disposed myself for sleep, there were no troubling fears. Unearthly the thing was, with the seem- ing of a dream, and yet it was-so safe!

Henry, as he monkeyed away with some apparatus, was singing in a low voice, once the following pessimistic lines of Swinburne's:

"He weaves, and is clothed with derision; Sows, and he shall not reap; His life is a watch or a vision Between a sleep and a sleep."

And then, just before unconsciousness settled upon me, as if from far away through dreamy silence came the follow- ing beautiful lines of Moore's, though the singer was not uttering them with that feeling which would have been concomitant to their utterance; perhaps I fancy, he did not even know what he was singing:

"As down in the sunless retreats of the Ocean, Sweet flowers are springing no mortal can see, So, deep in my soul the still prayer of devotion, Unheard by the world, rises silent to Thee, My God! silent to Thee- Pure, warm, silent, to Thee.

"As still to the star of its worship, tho' clouded, The needle points faithfully o'er the dim sea, So, dark as I roam, in this wintry world shrouded, The hope of my spirit turns trembling to Thee, My God! trembling, to Thee."

Then came silence.





sleep I was haunted, tortured by I had thought I knew what horrible dreams were, but I never knew until then. Their origin was, of course, to be found in the strange physical changes