“I could talk on this subject,” he said, “till night-fall if you desire, but it will be better for you to restrain your curiosity till you can be taken in person to the scene. Let me tell you in general terms what you will find. The comet fell, as I have said, in an uninhabited plain, but it is now at the door of the largest city on our planet, which has been built there since the discoveries were made. The excavations have left an immense opening, where galleries and chambers of great extent have been dug out. These have been finished off with untold labor, and new ones are being constantly added. Here is our greatest museum, beside which all other collections of natural objects are as nothing, for all that has been found in the comet remains there; nothing has been allowed to be taken away. You will appreciate something of the wonderful character of these curiosities when I tell you that they give evidence of a world many times larger than Jupiter and of an intellectual and spiritual development as much beyond ours as ours is in advance of that of the earth. “We have exhumed buried cities in our own planet more than once, where volcano or other convulsion had overwhelmed them, and found the relics of past civilization; but here, in our comet, we look not upon the past but upon the future, as it were, and see what has been done in a world much older than our own. The belief that the comet did not originate in our solar system has been verified, for we find that the globe of which it was once a part revolved around an immense sun which had a retinue of twenty-seven planets of various sizes. Whether this great sun is one of the stars of our firmament we can only conjecture; perhaps in some future state of existence we shall know.