She shook her head. “I do not understand,” she said. She closed her eyes, and waved her hands with a gesture that might have included the universe. “All, all, is rock,” she said, “except here in the center of everything, in this space we call Va-nah. All else is rock.” I suppressed a smile at the vast egotism of Va-nah, but yet how little different is it from many worldings, who conceive that the entire cosmos exists solely for the inhabitants of Earth. I even know men in our own enlightened twenty-first century, who insist that Mars is not inhabited and that the messages that are purported to come from our sister planet, are either the evidences of a great world hoax, or the voice of the devil luring people from belief in the true God. “Did you ever see my like in Va-nah?” I asked her. “No,” she replied, “I never did, but I have not been to every part of Va-nah. Va-nah is a very great world, and there are many corners of it of which I know nothing.” “I am not of Va-nah,” I told her again, “I am from another world far, far away;” and then I tried to explain something of the universe to her—of the sun and the planets and their satellites, but I saw that it was as far beyond her as are the conceptions of eternity and space beyond the finite mind of Earth Men. She simply couldn’t get it, that was all. To her, everything was solid rock that we know as space. She thought for a long time, though, and then she said, “Ah, perhaps after all there may be other worlds than Va-nah. The great Hoos, those vast holes that lead into the eternal rock, may open into other worlds like Va-nah. I have heard that theory discussed, but no one in Va-nah believes it. It is true, then!” she exclaimed brightly, “and you come from another world like Va-nah. You came through one of the Hoos, did you not?” “Yes, I came through one of the Hoos,” I replied—the word means hole in the Va-gas tongue—“but I did not come from a world like Va-nah. Here you live upon the inside of a hollow sphere. We Earth Men live upon the outside of a similar though much larger sphere.”