thousand folds, like a
wave of smooth water bursting into foaming rapids. Round her neck was
a garland of lustrous yellow pearls. On her head she wore a tiara of
much smaller dimensions than that worn on public occasions. Her pose
was upright as an arrow.

[Illustration: The Laburnul.]

I rose and bowed profoundly, and the goddess also bowing, requested me
to be seated.

"I have sent for you," said she, "to learn more about your country and
to talk with you about ours. I am consumed with curiosity regarding
the external world." "Your holiness," I replied, "permit me to say
that your graceful condescension exceeds, if possible, your splendor.
I am truly bewildered at the vastness of my good fortune in
discovering a country ruled by so glorious a goddess."

"And I also," said the goddess, "have learned that Bilbimtesirol is
not the universe, but a very small portion thereof indeed. I am
intensely interested in your accounts of the outer world. I am
overpowered with the thought that the exterior surface of the planet
is peopled with beings like ourselves, and that civilization,
government, religion, art, manufacture, and social life are so greatly
developed beneath a still more glorious sun than ours."

"Did it never occur to your astronomers," I inquired, "that human
activity might also pervade the outer sphere?"

[Illustration: The Green Gazzle of Glockett Gozzle.]

"Our astronomers," said the goddess, "have long since decided that the
conditions of climate on the exterior planet were too severe to allow
human life to exist. They are aware that a great luminary gave the
outer earth light by day, for our most daring aerial voyagers have
frequently caught a glimpse of its light seen through the polar gulf.
They argued that the equatorial regions were too hot, and the polar
regions too cold, to support life, consequently the outer earth was a
barren waste as desolate and uninhabited as your own satellite."

"Would your holiness like to visit the exterior earth?" I boldly
inquired.

"If duty did not prevent me," she replied, "I would love to visit
those far-off strange lands and peoples and see your sun and moon and
all the stars!"

From the goddess I first learned the precise location of Atvatabar.
Lying exactly underneath the Atlantic Ocean it stretched east and west
some two thousand miles, surrounded by the interior sea. There were
other continents in Bilbimtesirol which we had already dimly seen
spread up