about me in the most wonderful dance-measure you can conceive,
infinitely complex, but never for a moment confused, for the stars
were of various colours, more beautiful far than any of ours, and by
these, as they crossed and intertwined in exquisite harmonies, the
threads of the intricate figure were kept distinct.

"What I was looking upon, I knew, was the same heaven that our
astronomers describe; only I was privileged actually to perceive
the movements they can only infer and predict. For here on earth our
faculties are proportioned to our needs, and our apprehension of time
and change is measured by units too small for us to be able to embrace
by sense the large and spacious circuits of the stars. But I, in my
then condition, had powers commensurate with all existence; so that
not only could I follow with the eye the coils of that celestial
morrice, but in each one of the whirling orbs, as they approached
or receded in the dance, I could trace, so far as I was minded,
the course of its secular history; whole series of changes and
transformations such as we laboriously infer, from fossils and rocks
and hard unmalleable things, being there (as though petrifaction were
reversed and solidest things made fluid) unrolled before me, molten
and glowing and swift, in a stream of torrential evolution whose
moments were centuries. Wonderful it was, and strange, to see the
first trembling film creep like a mantle over a globe of fire, shiver,
and break, and form again, and gradually harden and cohere, now
crushed into ridges and pits, now extended into plains, and tossing
the hissing seas from bed to bed, as the levels of the viscous surface
rose and fell. Wonderful, too, when the crust was formed and life
became possible, how everywhere, in wet or dry, hot or cold alike,
wherever footing could be found, came up and flourished and decayed
things that root and things that move, winged or finned or legged,
creeping, flying, running, breeding, in mud or sand, in jungle,
forest, and marsh, pursuing and pursued, devouring and devoured,
pairing, contending, killing, things huge beyond belief, mammoth
and icthyosaurus, things minute and numerous past the power of
calculation, coming and going as they could find space, species
succeeding to species, and crowding every point and vantage for life
on the heaving tumultuous bosom of eddying worlds.

"Wonderful it was, but terrible, too; for what struck me with a kind
of chill, even whi