Two on a Tower - Page 138/147

Three years passed away, and Swithin still remained at the Cape, quietly

pursuing the work that had brought him there. His memoranda of

observations had accumulated to a wheelbarrow load, and he was beginning

to shape them into a treatise which should possess some scientific

utility.

He had gauged the southern skies with greater results than even he

himself had anticipated. Those unfamiliar constellations which, to the

casual beholder, are at most a new arrangement of ordinary points of

light, were to this professed astronomer, as to his brethren, a far

greater matter.

It was below the surface that his material lay. There, in regions

revealed only to the instrumental observer, were suns of hybrid kind--fire-

fogs, floating nuclei, globes that flew in groups like swarms of bees,

and other extraordinary sights--which, when decomposed by Swithin's

equatorial, turned out to be the beginning of a new series of phenomena

instead of the end of an old one.

There were gloomy deserts in those southern skies such as the north shows

scarcely an example of; sites set apart for the position of suns which

for some unfathomable reason were left uncreated, their places remaining

ever since conspicuous by their emptiness.

The inspection of these chasms brought him a second pulsation of that old

horror which he had used to describe to Viviette as produced in him by

bottomlessness in the north heaven. The ghostly finger of limitless

vacancy touched him now on the other side. Infinite deeps in the north

stellar region had a homely familiarity about them, when compared with

infinite deeps in the region of the south pole. This was an even more

unknown tract of the unknown. Space here, being less the historic haunt

of human thought than overhead at home, seemed to be pervaded with a more

lonely loneliness.

Were there given on paper to these astronomical exercitations of St.

Cleeve a space proportionable to that occupied by his year with Viviette

at Welland, this narrative would treble its length; but not a single

additional glimpse would be afforded of Swithin in his relations with old

emotions. In these experiments with tubes and glasses, important as they

were to human intellect, there was little food for the sympathetic

instincts which create the changes in a life. That which is the

foreground and measuring base of one perspective draught may be the

vanishing-point of another perspective draught, while yet they are both

draughts of the same thing. Swithin's doings and discoveries in the

southern sidereal system were, no doubt, incidents of the highest

importance to him; and yet from an intersocial point of view they served

but the humble purpose of killing time, while other doings, more nearly

allied to his heart than to his understanding, developed themselves at

home.