Come along, Zaidie, let's go and have a walk on deck." They had scarcely reached the upper deck when something happened which dwarfed all the other experiences of their marvellous voyage into utter insignificance.
Above and around them the constellations blazed with a splendour inconceivable to an observer on Earth, but ahead of them gaped the vast, black void which sailors call "the Coal Hole," and in which the most powerful telescopes have only discovered a few faintly luminous bodies.
Suddenly, out of the midst of this infinity of darkness, there blazed a glare of almost intolerably brilliant radiance.

Instantly the forward end of the _Astronef_ was bathed in light and heat--the light and heat of a re-created sun, whose elements had been dark and cold for uncounted ages.
Hundreds of tiny points of light, unknown worlds which had been dark for myriads of years, twinkled out of the blackness.

Then the fierce glare grew dimmer.

A vast mantle of luminous mist spread out with inconceivable rapidity, and in the midst of this blazed the central nucleus--the sun which in far-off ages to come would be the giver of light and heat, of life and beauty to worlds unborn, to planets which were now only little eddies of atoms whirling in that ocean of nebulous flame.
For more than an hour the two wanderers from the far-off Earth stood motionless and silent, gazing on the indescribable splendours of the fearfully magnificent spectacle before them.

Every mundane thought seemed burnt out of their souls by the glory and the wonder of it.