I apprehended it all together, within and without. It rose softly and
swiftly out of the expanse. The surface of it was all alive. It had
seas and continents, hills and valleys, woods and fields, like our own
earth. There were cities and houses thronged with living beings; it was
a world like our own, and yet there was hardly a form upon it that
resembled any earthly form, though all were articulate and definite,
ranging from growths which I knew to be vegetable, with a dumb and
sightless life of their own, up to beings of intelligence and purpose.
It was a world, in fact, on which a history like that of our own world
was working itself out; but the whole was of a crystalline texture, if
texture it can be called; there was no colour or solidity, nothing but
form and silence, and I realised that I saw, if not materially yet in
thought, and recognised then, that all the qualities of matter, the
sounds, the colours, the scents--all that depends upon material
vibration--were abstracted from it; while form, of which the idea exists
in the mind apart from all concrete manifestations, was still present.
For some time after that, a series of these crystalline globes passed
through the atmosphere where I dwelt, some near, some far; and I saw in
an instant, in each case, the life and history of each. Some were still
all aflame, mere currents of molten heat and flying vapour. Some had the
first signs of rudimentary life--some, again, had a full and organised
life, such as ours on earth, with a clash of nations, a stream of
commerce, a perfecting of knowledge. Others were growing cold, and the
life upon them was artificial and strange, only achieved by a highly
intellectual and noble race, with an extraordinary command of natural
forces, fighting in wonderfully constructed and guarded dwellings
against the growing deathliness of a frozen world, and with a tortured
despair in their minds at the extinction which threatened them. There
were others, again, which were frozen and dead, where the drifting snow
piled itself up over the gigantic and pathetic contrivances of a race