Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED, 401

dow. There is no dust perceptible, at least not enough to obscure the landscape ; yet at the end of the journey you find yourself covered with a very evident coating of dust. Now, suppose that, instead of traveling one hundred miles, your ride had been prolonged a million miles, or thirteen million miles ; and, instead of the atmosphere being perfectly clear, you had moved through a cloud of dust, not dense enough to intercept the light of the stars, and yet dense erough to reflect the light of the sun, even asa smoke-wreath reflects it, and you can readily see that, long before you reached the end of your journey, you would be buried alive under hundreds of feet of dust. To creatures like ourselves, measuring our stature by feet and inches, a Drift-deposit three hundred feet thick is an immense affair, even as a deposit a foot thick would be to an ant ; but, measured on an astronomical scale, with the foot-rule of the heavens, and the Drift is no more than a thin coating of dust, such as accumulates on a traveler’s coat. Even estimating it upon the scale of our planet, it is a mere wrapping of tissue-paper thickness. In short, it must be remembered that we are an infinitely insignificant breed of little creatures, to whom a cosmical dustshower is a cataclysm.

And that which is true of the clay-dust is true of the gravel. At a million miles’ distance it, too, is dust; it runs in lines or streaks, widely separated ; and the light shines between its particles as it does through the leaves of the trees :

“ And glimmering through the groaning trees Kirk Alloway seems in a blaze ; Through every bore the beams are glancing.”

But another says :

“Why do you think the finer parts of the material of the comet are carried farthest back from the head ?” 18