way is nothing but a cloud of stars that seem to us as one
mass, but which in reality are so far apart that thousands of suns
like ours with all their planets could revolve among them without ever
coming into collision."

Gabriel remembered the travelling of sound and light. "Their velocity
is insignificant compared with the distances in space. The sun, which
is the nearest to us, is still so far that for a sound to go from us
to it would take three millions of years. Poor human beings will never
be able to travel with the rapidity of sound.

"These suns travel like ours towards the unknown with giddy flight,
but they are so distant that three or four thousand years may pass
without man being aware that they have moved more than a finger's
breadth. The distances of infinity are maddening. The sun is a nebula
of inflammatory gas, and the earth an imperceptible molecule of sand.

"The luminous ray of the Polar star requires half a century to reach
our eyes; it might have disappeared forty-nine years ago, and still we
should see it in space.

"And all these worlds are created, grow and die like human beings.
In space there is no more rest than on earth. Some stars are
extinguished, others vary, and others shine with all the power of
their young life. The dead planets dissolved by fires furnish
the material for new worlds; it is a perpetual renewal of forms,
throughout millions and millions of centuries, that represent in their
lives what the few dozen years to which we are limited, are in our
own. And beyond all those incalculable distances there is space, and
more space on every side, with fresh conglomerations of worlds without
limit or end."

Gabriel spoke in the midst of solemn silence. The listeners closed
their eyes as if such immensity stunned them. They followed in
imagination Gabriel's description, but their narrowed minds wished to
place a term to the infinite, and in their simplicity they imagined
beyond these incalculable distances a vault of firm matter millions of
leagues thick. Surely all that strange and fantastic work must have a
limit. What was at the back of it? And the barrier created by their
imagination fell suddenly; and again they flew through space, always
infinite, with ever new worlds.

Gabriel spoke of them and of their life with absolute certainty.
Spectral analysis showed the same composition in the stars as on the
earth, consequently if life had arisen in our atom, most certainly it
m