This life is
evenly celestial, and glowing, and carelessly happy. And here knowledge
is extreme and pervasive and omnipotent. The dear commonplaces of the
Earth life are unknown too, the ludicrous is absent, and the sublimity
of sacrifice impossible.'
"He laughed again, and I felt for one brief, incredible instant a pang,
too, that the blossoming, full, sensual Earth has passed from beneath my
feet forever.
"But it was past. For me nothing was left behind when Martha had gone
before. The future for me was the pilgrimage through worlds for her lost
face. The sum and substance of a world's growth, of the unintermittent
and heraldic progress of the soul was union with her. And deeper in my
convictions than science or faith or desire, lay the consciousness of my
sure approach.
"Again the evening fell. We arrived at the entrance of a gloomy and
stupendous gorge. It was the wonderful passage driven through the first
area of igneous rocks before we reached the quarry country of the
Tiniti. It pierced the dark and stubborn dike that rose in sheer walls
like the Palisades on the Hudson, 1,000 and 1,200 feet above our heads,
and it seemed that the darkening tide was carrying us into the bowels of
the sphere. As the precipitous walls rose on either side, a loud report,
followed by another more muffled, startled us. Looking upward, Chapman,
shouting '_Golki, tanto_,' with outstretched hand pointed to a flaming
missile passing over our heads, and apparently in the direction we were
heading.
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