our bodies will not be long in their graves before we shall again begin
to live; and my feeling is, that, though consciousness will at the death
of this body be obscured for a time, it will not be lost for a _long_
time. I feel that almost at once after death the mystery of conscious
individuality will again assert itself. Refined by this life, as the
molecular construction of inorganic matter is refined by passing through
organic life, so the consciousness lately within the molecules of your
discarded body, will not be as the consciousness within like molecules
of mineral or of vegetable matter; for it will be your consciousness
--_your_ consciousness, created by God and developed by His edict
--developed after slumbering for ages within the mineral; awakening
to quicker action in the vegetable world; touching the domain of
conscious memory in lower animals; aroused to keener moral and
intellectual existence in your late body, and at last made ready for a
new mystery--what, we know not--in another world, possibly in the
direction of what we might call a 'fourth dimension' of consciousness.
Oh, no; there should not be anything to prevent us from knowing now that
we shall continue to exist, and to go ever upward, upward, upward.
Nature permits us, in each sphere of being, to catch a glimpse of the
succeeding one, if only we will not ourselves obstruct the view."

A moment later he dropped into an animated, almost rhapsodical, running
comment on some of the scenic beauties surrounding Hili-li.

"Imagine," he said, "what the scenic effects must have been, everywhere
within the illumination of that great lake of fire, covering an area of
nearly two hundred square miles--that great lake of white, boiling,
earthy matter, brilliantly lighting the long antarctic night. Think of
those mountains, with the Olympian offshoot six miles in height; and of
the peak called Mount Olympus, looming up ten thousand feet above even