htning; for a few seconds it blotted out the
sun, and there and then became a mere black, dwindling, winged patch
against the light. The earth, the mother mote of my being, I could no
longer see.

So with a stately swiftness, in the profoundest silence, the solar system
fell from me as it had been a garment, until the sun was a mere star amid
the multitude of stars, with its eddy of planet-specks lost in the
confused glittering of the remoter light. I was no longer a denizen of the
solar system: I had come to the outer Universe, I seemed to grasp and
comprehend the whole world of matter. Ever more swiftly the stars closed
in about the spot where Antares and Vega had vanished in a phosphorescent
haze, until that part of the sky had the semblance of a whirling mass of
nebulae, and ever before me yawned vaster gaps of vacant blackness, and
the stars shone fewer and fewer. It seemed as if I moved towards a point
between Orion's belt and sword; and the void about that region opened
vaster and vaster every second, an incredible gulf of nothingness into
which I was falling. Faster and ever faster the universe rushed by, a
hurry of whirling motes at last, speeding silently into the void. Stars
glowing brighter and brighter, with their circling planets catching the
light in a ghostly fashion as I neared them, shone out and vanished again
into inexistence; faint comets, clusters of meteorites, winking specks of
matter, eddying light-points, whizzed past, some perhaps a hundred
millions of miles or so from me at most, few nearer, travelling with
unimaginable rapidity, shooting constellations, momentary darts of fire,
through that black, enormous night. More than anything else it was like a
dusty draught, sunbeam-lit. Broader and wider and deeper grew the starless
space, the vacant Beyond, into which I was being drawn. At last a quarter
of the heavens was black and blank, and the whole headlong rush of stellar
universe closed in behind me like a veil of light that is gathered
together. It drove away from me like a monstrous jack-o'-lantern driven by
the wind. I had come out into the wilderness of space. Ever the vacant
blackness grew broader, until the hosts of the stars seemed only like a
swarm of fiery specks hurrying away from me, inconceivably remote, and the
darkness, the nothingness and emptiness, was about me on every side. Soon
the little universe of matter, the cage of points in which I had begun to
be, was dwindling, now t