Sagrario, who had never been out of the upper cloister since her return to the paternal roof, looked at the stars with delight.
"How many stars!" she murmured dreamily.
"There are more than usual to-night," said the bell-ringer. "The summer sky seems a field of stars in which the harvest increases with the fine weather."
Gabriel smiled at the simplicity of his companions. They all wondered at God, so foreseeing and so thoughtful, who had made the moon to give light to men by night, and the stars so that the darkness should not be complete.
"Well, then," inquired Gabriel, "why is there not a moon always if it was made to give us light?"
There was a long silence. They were all thinking over Gabriel's question. The bell-ringer, being most intimate with the master, ventured to put the question about which they were all thinking. "What were the heavens, and what was there beyond the blue?"
The square was now deserted and in darkness, there was no light but the gentle shimmering of the stars scattered in space like golden dust. From the immense vault there seemed to fall a religious calm, an overwhelming majesty that stirred the souls of those simple people. The infinite seemed to bewilder them with its vast grandeur.
"You," said Gabriel, "have your eyes closed to immensity, you cannot understand it. You have been taught a wretched and rudimentary origin of the world, imagined by a few ragged and ignorant Jews in a corner of Asia, which, having been written in a book, has been accepted down to our days. This personal God, like to ourselves in His shape and passions, is an artificer of gigantic capacity, who worked six days and made everything existing. On the first day He created light, and on the fourth the sun and stars; from whence then came that light if the sun had not then been created? Is there any distinction between one and the other? It seems impossible that such absurdities should have been credited for centuries."
The listeners nodded their heads in assent; the absurdity appeared to them palpable—as it always did when Gabriel spoke.
"If you wish to penetrate the heavens," continued Luna, "you must get rid of the human conception of distance. Man measures everything by his own stature, and he conceives dimensions by the distance his eyes can reach. This Cathedral seems to us enormous because underneath its naves we seem like ants; but, nevertheless, the Cathedral seen from far is only an insignificant wart; compared with the piece of land we call Spain it is less than a grain of sand, and on the face of the earth it is a mere atom—nothing. Our sight makes us consider thirty or forty yards a dizzy height. At this moment we think we are very high because we are near the roof of the Cathedral, but compared to the infinite this height is as small as when an ant balances on the top of a pebble not knowing how to come down. Our sight is short, and we who can only measure by yards, and apprehend short distances, must make an immense effort of imagination to realise infinity. Even then it escapes us and we speak of it very often as of a thing that has no meaning. How shall I make you understand the immensity of the world? You must not believe, as our ancestors did, that the earth is flat and stationary and that the heaven is a crystal dome on which God has fastened the stars like golden nails, and in which the sun and moon move to give us light, you must understand that the earth is round, and whirls round in space."