"Chapman laughed, and an echo gave back from some hillside its musical response. 'Ah, it may be, I know it is true, and yet--and yet--the Earth possessed a pictorial, a dramatic power in its contrasts of happiness and suffering, of goodness and sin. It had literary material. Its consecutive growth in the ages of social and national and economic history were so wonderful, so thrilling in interest, in the details of character and adventure, in the incessant panoramic display it gave of light and shade. And on it rested the shadow of a strange, pathetic doubt, the mystery of creation. Its romance, its fiction, its fable, and the animating picture it furnished, with its sceptics and its believers, its haters and its lovers, its tyrants and its heroes. Its wide, verbal immensity! I miss all that, or almost all. This life is evenly celestial, and glowing, and carelessly happy. And here knowledge is extreme and pervasive and omnipotent. The dear commonplaces of the Earth life are unknown too, the ludicrous is absent, and the sublimity of sacrifice impossible.' "He laughed again, and I felt for one brief, incredible instant a pang, too, that the blossoming, full, sensual Earth has passed from beneath my feet forever. "But it was past. For me nothing was left behind when Martha had gone before. The future for me was the pilgrimage through worlds for her lost face. The sum and substance of a world's growth, of the unintermittent and heraldic progress of the soul was union with her. And deeper in my convictions than science or faith or desire, lay the consciousness of my sure approach. "Again the evening fell. We arrived at the entrance of a gloomy and stupendous gorge. It was the wonderful passage driven through the first area of igneous rocks before we reached the quarry country of the Tiniti. It pierced the dark and stubborn dike that rose in sheer walls like the Palisades on the Hudson, 1,000 and 1,200 feet above our heads, and it seemed that the darkening tide was carrying us into the bowels of the sphere. As the precipitous walls rose on either side, a loud report, followed by another more muffled, startled us. Looking upward, Chapman, shouting '_Golki, tanto_,' with outstretched hand pointed to a flaming missile passing over our heads, and apparently in the direction we were heading. "It was a meteor. It was just such a phenomenon as we know of on the Earth. I felt certain that it was a bolide from space, one of those fiery visitors of stone and iron that collide occasionally with our Earth, and that somewhere before us, in the country we were approaching, it would be found. "Later a few straggling shooting stars appeared. The languor of fatigue overcame me, and I slept prostrate on the cushions of the deck as the murmurous reverberations from the walls of the rock-bound canal rose and fell, with the cadence of the waves, splashing softly against their feet.