“How bright and lovely it is! Some of the stars seem to be cold, they tremble so as they shine; and others are motionless, as if they were watching us.”
“They are, in effect, fixed stars. Do you see that band of light that crosses the sky?”
“That looks like a wide silver gauze ribbon?”
“That is the Milky Way; a collection of stars, the number of which is so great as to be inconceivable even to the imagination. Our sun is one of the ants of that ant-hill,—one of those stars.”
“The sun—is it a star?” asked the young girl in surprise.
“A fixed star—we whirl around it like mad people.”
“Ah, how delightful to know all those things! In the school I attended, we were not taught a particle of all that, and Doña Romualda used to laugh at me when I would say I was going to ask Father Urtazu—who is always looking at the heavens through a big telescope—what the stars and the sun and the moon are.”
Artegui turned to the right, following the embankment, while he explained to Lucía the first notions of that science of astronomy which seems like a celestial romance, a fantastic tale written in characters of light on sapphire tablets. The young girl, enraptured, gazed now at her companion, now at the serene firmament. She was amazed, above all, at the magnitude and number of the stars.
“How vast the sky is! Dear Lord! if the material, the visible heavens are so great, what must the real heavens be, where the Virgin, the angels, and the saints are!”
Artegui shook his head, and bending toward Lucía, murmured: