"Let me think it out," I replied, and reasoning from his remarks, I mentally followed the chain to its sequence, and was startled as suddenly it dawned upon me that if his argument was true we must remain motionless in this spot until death (could beings in conditions like ourselves die beyond the death we had already achieved) or the end of time. We were at perfect rest, in absolute vacancy, there being, as I now accepted without reserve, neither gas, liquid, nor solid, that we could employ as a lever to start us into motion. "Tell me," I cried in alarm, "is this to be a living tomb? Are we to remain suspended here forever, and if not, by what method can we hope to extricate ourselves from this state of perfect quiescence?" He again took the bar of iron from my hand, and cautiously gave it a whirling motion, releasing it as he did so. It revolved silently and rapidly in space without support or pivot. "So it would continue," he remarked, "until the end of time, were it not for the fact that I could not possibly release it in a condition of absolute horizontal rest. There is a slight, slow, lateral motion that will carry the object parallel with this sheet of energy to the material side of this crevice, when its motion will 'be arrested by the earth it strikes.'" "That I can understand," I replied, and then a ray of light broke upon me. "Had not Cavendish demonstrated that, when a small ball of lead is suspended on a film of silk, near a mass of iron or lead, it is drawn towards the greater body? We will be drawn by gravity to the nearest cliff," I cried. "You mistake," he answered; "Cavendish performed his experiments on the surface of the earth, and there gravity is always ready to start an object into motion. Here objects have no weight, and neither attract nor repel each other. The force of cohesion holds together substances that are in contact, but as gravitation can not now affect matter out of molecular contact with other forms of matter, because of the equilibrium of all objects, so it may be likewise said, that bodies out of contact have at this point no attraction for one another. If they possessed this attribute, long ago we would have been drawn towards the earth cliff with inconceivable velocity. However, if by any method our bodies should receive an impulse sufficient to start them into motion, ever so gently though it be, we in like manner would continue to move in this frictionless medium--until--" "We would strike the material boundary of this crevice," I interrupted. "Yes; but can you conceive of any method by which such voluntary motion can now be acquired?" "No."