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Updated: May 9, 2025
Through the greyness of the swift evening, I saw the silver crescent of the moon, falling out of the Southern sky, toward the West. The evening seemed to merge into an almost instant night. Above me, the many constellations passed in a strange, 'noiseless' circling, Westward. The moon fell through that last thousand fathoms of the night-gulf, and there was only the starlight....
And as this huge continent swept along overshadowing the earth, upon its slopes they discerned the twinkling lights of a thousand sleeping villages, and it was as if the constellations were filing in procession through the sky. While they were looking, Hanuman stumbled, and a small ridge of red sandstone twenty miles long was jolted loose and fell.
I was astonished at their brightness, to see how they filled the night with their soft lustre. So I went my way accompanied by them; Arcturus followed me, and becoming entangled in a leafy tree, shone by glimpses, and then emerged triumphant, Lord of the Western sky. Moving along the road in the silence of my own footsteps, my thoughts were among the Constellations.
Sylvia spoke, after a time, of immaterial things, or answered his questions as to the identity of the constellations mapped in the clear arch above. "I dream sometimes of another existence," she said, "as I suppose every one does, when I knew a quiet lake that held the stars as this does.
For a long time the ruddy planet had been growing larger and more formidable, gradually turning from a huge star into a great red moon, and then expanding more and more until it began to shut out from sight the constellations behind it.
The Zodiacal constellations at any rate, or those through which the sun's course lies would seem to have had this origin; and many of them may be distinctly recognized on Babylonian monuments which are plainly of a stellar character.
The latitude, from concurrent measurement of the Giant, the Bull, Orion, Aldebaran, and other constellations in the absence of the sun was ascertained to be a little above seventy-six degrees, and the variations of the needle were accurately noted. On the 24th January it was clear weather and comparatively mild, so that Heemskerk, with De Veer and another, walked to the strand.
His only bed is the sheepskin, which when riding he fastens over his saddle, and the latter article forms his pillow. His coverlet is the firmament of heaven, the Southern Cross and other constellations, unseen by dwellers in the Northern Hemisphere, seeming to keep watch over him; or in the colder season his poncho, which I have already described.
Yet, on account of the minuteness of the majority of their stars, neither of these constellations makes by any means as brilliant a display as does Orion, to which Argelander assigns only one hundred and fifteen naked-eye stars, and Heis one hundred and thirty-six.
Max took a single glance aloft at the star-studded heavens, and this told him pretty close on the hour; for in addition to many other ways of the forest nomad and believer in woodcraft, Max had mastered the positions of the planets, so that it was always possible for him to gauge the passage of time when the night granted him a survey of the constellations above.
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