"It is enough to drive one mad," murmured the
bell-ringer. "What then is man, Gabriel?"

"Nothing; even as this earth, which seems so large,
and that we have peopled with religions, kingdoms and
revelations from God, is nothing. Dreams of ants I even
less ! This same sun which seems so enormous com-
pared to our globe is nothing more than an atom in
immensity. What you call stars are other suns likfe
ours, surrounded by planets like our earth, but which
are invisible on account of their small size. How many
are they? Man brings his optical instruments to per-
fection and is able to pierce further into the fields of
heaven, discovering ever more and more. Those which
are scarcely visible in the infinite appear much nearer
when a new telescope is invented, and beyond them in
the depths of space others and again others a.^v*ax , %sA



238 THE SHADOW OF THE CATHEDRAL

so on everlastingly. They are unaccountable. Some are
worlds inhabited like ours ; others were so, and revoke
solitary in space, waiting for a fresh evolution of life;
many are still forming; and yet all these worlds are no
more than corpuscles of the luminous mist of the
infinite. Space is peopled by fires that have burnt fof
millions, trillions and quadrillions of centuries, throwing
out heat and light. The milky way is nothing but a
cloud of stars that seem to us as one mass, but which in
reality are so far apart that thousands of suns like ours
with all their planets could revolve among them without
ever coming into collision.*'

Gabriel remembered the travelling of sound and light
"Their velocity is insignificant compared with the dis-
tances in space. The sun, which is the nearest to us, is
still so far that for a sound to go from us to it would
take three millions of years. Poor human beings will
never be able to travel with the rapidity of sound.
