While she was speaking I had watched the flight of the aerial creatures toward the city of flowers, and saw with astonishment that the plants were moving, raising or lowering themselves to receive them. The green sun had sunk beneath the horizon, and the yellow sun had risen in the sky; the landscape was suffused with a fairy-like tinge, over which hung an enormous half-green, half-orange moon. Then the infinite melody which had been filling the air died away, and amid a profound silence I heard a song arise from so pure a voice that no human tones could be compared with it.
"What a marvellous system!" I cried,—"a world illumined by such glowing lights! It is having a close view of double, triple, and multiple stars."
"Splendid suns those stars," she answered, "gracefully united in the bonds of a mutual attraction; from the Earth you see them cradled two and two on the bosom of the sky, always beautiful, pure, and luminous. Hanging in the infinite, they lean to each other, but never touch, as though their union, more moral than material, were ordered by an invisible and superior power, and following harmonious curves, they gravitate in cadence around each other,—celestial couples which blossomed at the spring-time of creation in the constellated meadows of infinity. While simple suns like yours shine in the deserts of space solitary, fixed, and undisturbed, double and multiple suns seem to enliven the silent regions of the eternal void by their motion, color, and life. These sidereal time-keepers mark the centuries and eras of other worlds for you.
"But," she added, "let us continue our journey; we are but a few trillion leagues from the Earth."
"A few trillion?"
"Yes. If we could hear the sounds of your planet from here,—its volcanoes, cannonadings, and thunders, or the wild vociferations of its crowds in times of revolution, or the hymns which rise to heaven from the churches,—the distance is so great that, even admitting that the noises could surmount it with the speed of sound in the air, it would require not less than fifteen million years to reach here. We could hear to-day only what took place on Earth fifteen million years ago. And yet, compared with the immensity of the universe, we are still very near your home.
"You can still distinguish your Sun yonder,—that tiny little star. We have not been out of the universe to which it, with its system of planets, belongs. That universe is composed of several thousand milliards of suns, separated from each other by trillions of leagues. Its extent is so vast that it would take a flash of lightning fifteen thousand years to cross it, travelling at the rate of three hundred thousand kilometres a second.
"And suns everywhere, on all sides! In whatever direction we look, all about us are sources of light, heat, and life in inexhaustible variety,—suns of every lustre, of all magnitudes, all ages, upheld in the eternal void, in the luminous ether, by the mutual attraction of all and the motion of each. Your Sun moves and bears you away toward the constellation of Hercules; that one, whose system we have just crossed, goes south toward the Pleiades; Sirius hurries away toward the Dove; Pollux whirls swiftly toward the Milky Way. All these millions, these thousands of millions, of suns hasten through boundless space with a speed which attains a velocity of two, three, and even four thousand metres a second. Motion maintains the equilibrium of the universe, and constitutes its organization, energy, and life."
