was immediately drawn to a great tapering light that sprang from the
place on the horizon where the sun would rise later, and that seemed
to be blown out over the stars like a long, luminous veil. It was the
finest view of the Zodiacal light that I had ever enjoyed -- thrilling
in its strangeness -- but I was almost disheartened by the
indifference of my guide, to whom it was only a light and nothing
more. If he had no science, he had less poetry -- rather a remarkable
thing, I thought, for a child of his clime. The Light appeared to me
to be distinctly brighter than the visible part of the Milky Way which
included the brilliant stretches in Auriga and Perseus, and its color,
if one may speak of color in connection with such an object, seemed
richer than that of the galactic band; but I did not think of it as
yellow, although Humboldt has described it as resembling a golden
curtain drawn over the stars, and Du Chaillu in Equatorial Africa
found it of a bright yellow color. It may vary in color as in
conspicuousness. The fascination of that extraordinary sight has never
faded from my memory. I turned to regard it again and again, although
I had never seen the stellar heavens so brilliant, and it was one of
the last things I looked for when the morning glow began softly to
mount in the east, and Sicily and the Mediterranean slowly emerged
from the profound shadow beneath us.

The Zodiacal Light seems never to have attracted from astronomers in
general the amount of careful attention that it deserves; perhaps
because so little can really be made of it as far as explanation is
concerned. I have referred to the restraint that scientific writers
apparently feel in speaking of it. The grounds for speculation that it
affords may be too scanty to lead to long discussions, yet it piques
curiosity, and as we shall see in a moment has finally led to a most
interesting theory. Once it was the subject of an elaborate series of