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These icy nights, too, were often filled with the strange meteors of the north. Hour by hour have I watched the many-hued shafts of the aurora trembling from their northern home across the starlight of the zenith, till their lustre lighted up the silent landscape of the frozen river with that weird light which the Indians name "the dance of the dead spirits."
Skimming the long ridges of the hills and rushing through the pure air of mountain tops; threading the star-beams; bathing themselves from head to foot in an ocean of cool, clean wind; swimming on the waves of viewless currents currents warmed only by the magic of the stars, and kissed by the burning lips of flying meteors.
No meteor under a quarter-inch size could hope to make a puncture, even at the forty-five-mile-per-second speed that is the theoretical maximum for meteors. And if one did, the selfsealing stuff would stop the leak immediately. Joe could explain the protection of the metal skins. He did. "When a missile travels fast enough," he said absorbedly, "it stops acquiring extra puncturing ability.
Up there one can still, however, fancy one's self back in the period of Christian the Seventh's reign. As then in Jutland, so even now, stretch for miles and miles the brown heaths, with their tumuli, their meteors, their knolly, sandy cross roads.
For a series of years the aggression had been prosecuted with fearful issue to the Indians, when, at length, one of those daring spirits, that appear like meteors, few and far between, in the horizon of glory and intelligence, suddenly started up in the person of Tecumseh, who, possessed of a genius, as splendid in conception, as it was bold in execution, long continued to baffle the plans and defeat the measures of his most experienced enemies.
By this arrangement are generations of living things produced; and in like manner are tempests and meteors engendered by the circular motion, and by the approach and recession of the sun.
The cloudlet might be a distant comet, it might be a less distant body of meteors clustering densely in some particular part of their orbit; and, unfortunately, I was not likely to solve the problem. Gradually the nebula changed its position, but not its form, seeming to move downwards and towards the stern of my vessel, as if I were passing it without approaching nearer.
On the night of November 28th, when the earth was crossing the plane of the orbit of the missing comet, a brilliant shower of meteors burst from the northern sky, traveling nearly in the track which the comet should have pursued. The astronomers were electrified.
I was not conscious of their designs upon me until I saw them whirring toward me, two bright, swiftly moving atoms, glowing like tiny meteors, humming like a very battalion of bees. They betook themselves to two chosen cords and, close together, settled themselves with no further demands upon existence.
"The feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of everything into every other thing. Facts which had never before left their stark common sense suddenly figure as Eleusinian mysteries. My boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors, and constellations. All the facts in Nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language.
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