There
were others, again, which were frozen and dead, where the drifting snow
piled itself up over the gigantic and pathetic contrivances of a race
living underground, with huge vents and chimneys, burrowing further
into the earth in search of shelter, and nurturing life by amazing
processes which I cannot here describe. They were marvellously wise,
those pale and shadowy creatures, with a vitality infinitely ahead of
our own, a vitality out of which all weakly or diseased elements had
long been eliminated. And again there were globes upon which all seemed
dead and frozen to the core, slipping onwards in some infinite progress.
But though I saw life under a myriad of new conditions, and with an
endless variety of forms, the nature of it was the same as ours. There
was the same ignorance of the future, the same doubts and uncertainties,
the same pathetic leaning of heart to heart, the same wistful desire
after permanence and happiness, which could not be there or so attained.
Then, too, I saw wild eddies of matter taking shape, of a subtlety that
is as far beyond any known earthly conditions of matter as steam is
above frozen stone.
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