(c.) After a state of repose of many hundred thousand years a new catastrophe occurred. Space became too large even for itself. It then suffered, for many hundred thousand years, enormous compression. During this long period all its embedded Spirits perished, and space itself, during six hundred thousand years, became one vast and solid desert, containing no living beings.
But the vast periods of the past were as nothing compared with the long series of cycles which now succeeded—each in itself comprising millions of years.
About this time recorded history began, and is believed, by the Spirit with whom I was in conference, to be as authentic as the nature of the circumstances admit.
One solitary survivor seems to have escaped the crash of systems and the condensation of space. He proceeded to cut himself into two parts, and to advise each part to follow out the same course, directing them to transmit the command of their first parent throughout all time. Alone, in the midst of infinite solidity, the newly-severed beings, setting themselves back to back, exerted force. Thus urged, matter itself gave {409} way, and they occupied an elongated hollow space. Then again bisecting themselves, they further lengthened the path. After ten thousand years they began to exert their energies in the transverse directions of that path, and thus widened it. The race then began to form chambers, each for himself, into which he might retire for abstruse calculations, the nature of which seemed almost beyond the remotest reach of utility, although not beyond the power of the Analytical Engine. Thus vast cities, as it were, became formed, penetrating in every direction through solid space.
(d.) After millions of years of industry quietness and calculations, a most extraordinary catastrophe occurred. It was with the greatest difficulty that I could discover its nature, or how to explain it in ordinary language. The nearest approach I can make towards its explanation is this:—It seemed, from what my spiritual informant communicated, that the whole universe was lifted up bodily, and then borne rapidly back with a great shock, thus disarranging everything, and destroying millions of their race.
〈CONVERSION OF ATTICS INTO CELLARS.〉
But the most incomprehensible part of this historic narration was, that on the survivors recovering their senses, they found that everything which had formerly been on their right hand was now on their left. They also observed, to their still greater dismay, that every abode in the universe was turned topsy-turvy, so that the surviving philosophers, who had retired to their attics to study, suddenly found themselves in their cellars.
I have conveyed, as carefully as the nature of the subject admits, the impressions this relation made upon me, sometimes assisted in my slow apprehensions by another unembodied Spirit, whom, to distinguish from the relator, I shall call Mathesis. {410}
〈THE TRUE USE OF FIGURES.〉
Whenever a man can get hold of numbers, they are invaluable: if correct, they assist in informing his own mind, but they are still more useful in deluding the minds of others. Numbers are the masters of the weak, but the slaves of the strong. I therefore earnestly pressed for more exact information as to the possible number of years; but it appeared beyond the Spirit’s power to estimate it, even within a few millions. He mentioned incidentally that the last vast period he had just described was merely one of many others of similar extent: also, that though these periods were not actually equal, the difference, which even in extreme cases only reached a hundred thousand years, was not worth considering.