ow that it was a mainly metallic
mass, certainly of some size, perhaps four, perhaps twenty feet in
diameter, and apparently composed chiefly of iron; showing a more or
less blistered surface, but with angles sharper and faces more
regularly defined than most of those which have been found upon the
earth's surface--as if the shape of the latter might be due in part to
the conflagration they undergo in passing at such tremendous speed
through the atmosphere, or, in an opposite sense, to the fractures
caused by the shock of their falling. Though I made no attempt to
count the innumerable stars in the midst of which I appeared to float,
I was convinced that their number was infinitely greater than that
visible to the naked eye on the brightest night. I remembered how
greatly the inexperienced eye exaggerates the number of stars visible
from the Earth, since poets, and even olden observers, liken their
number to that of the sands on the seashore; whereas the patient work
of map and catalogue makers has shown that there are but a few
thousands visible in the whole heavens to the keenest unaided sight. I
suppose that I saw a hundred times that number. In one word, the
sphere of darkness in which I floated seemed to be filled with points
of light, while the absolute blackness that surrounded them, the
absence of the slightest radiation, or illumination of space at large,
was strange beyond expression to an eye accustomed to that diffusion
of light which is produced by the atmosphere. I may mention here that
the recognition of the constellations was at first exceedingly
difficult. On Earth we see so few stars in any given portion of the
heavens, that one recognises without an effort the figure marked out
by a small number of the brightest amongst them; while in my position
the multitude was so great that only patient and repeated effort
enabled me to separate from the rest those peculiarly brilliant
luminaries by which we are accustomed to define such constellations as
Orion or the Bear, to say nothing of those minor or more arbitrarily
drawn figures which contain few stars of the second magnitude. The eye
had no instinctive sense of distance; any star might have been within
a stone's throw. I need hardly observe that, while on one hand the
motion of the vessel was absolutely imperceptible, there was, on the
other, no change of position among the stars which could enable me to
verify the fact that I was moving, much less suggest