uded to when I said
that ten years ago I reached the goal. After years of labour, after
years of toiling and groping in the dark, after days and nights of
disappointments and sometimes of despair, in which I used now and then
to tremble and grow cold with the thought that perhaps there were
others seeking for what I sought, at last, after so long, a pang of
sudden joy thrilled my soul, and I knew the long journey was at an end.
By what seemed then and still seems a chance, the suggestion of a
moment's idle thought followed up upon familiar lines and paths that I
had tracked a hundred times already, the great truth burst upon me, and
I saw, mapped out in lines of sight, a whole world, a sphere unknown;
continents and islands, and great oceans in which no ship has sailed
(to my belief) since a Man first lifted up his eyes and beheld the sun,
and the stars of heaven, and the quiet earth beneath. You will think
this all high-flown language, Clarke, but it is hard to be literal.
And yet; I do not know whether what I am hinting at cannot be set forth
in plain and lonely terms. For instance, this world of ours is pretty
well girded now with the telegraph wires and cables; thought, with
something less than the speed of thought, flashes from sunrise to
sunset, from north to south, across the floods and the desert places.
Suppose that an electrician of today were suddenly to perceive that he
and his friends have merely been playing with pebbles and mistaking
them for the foundations of the world; suppose that such a man saw
uttermost space lie open before the current, and words of men flash
forth to the sun and beyond the sun into the systems beyond, and the
voice of articulate-speaking men echo in the waste void that bounds our
thought. As analogies go, that is a pretty good analogy of what I have
done; you can understand now a little of what I felt as I stood here
one evening; it was a summer evening, and the valley looked much as it
does now; I stood here, and saw before me the unutterable, the
unthinkable gulf that yawns profound between two worlds, the world of
matter and the world of spirit; I saw the great empty deep stretch dim
before me, and in that instant a bridge of light leapt from the earth
to the unknown shore, and the abyss was spanned. You may look in
Browne Faber's book, if you like, and you will find that to the present
day men of science are unable to account for the presence, or to
specify the functions o