He climbed into the embrasure.  His feelings translated themselves into vision, and he saw a sight that caused him to turn pale.  A gigantic, self-luminous sphere was hanging in the sky, occupying nearly the whole of it.  This sphere was composed entirely of two kinds of active beings.  There were a myriad of tiny green corpuscles, varying in size from the very small to the almost indiscernible.  They were not green, but he somehow saw them so.  They were all striving in one direction—­toward himself, toward Muspel, but were too feeble and miniature to make any headway.  Their action produced the marching rhythm he had previously felt, but this rhythm was not intrinsic in the corpuscles themselves, but was a consequence of the obstruction they met with.  And, surrounding these atoms of life and light, were far larger whirls of white light that gyrated hither and thither, carrying the green corpuscles with them wherever they desired.  Their whirling motion was accompanied by the waltzing rhythm.  It seemed to Nightspore that the green atoms were not only being danced about against their will but were suffering excruciating shame and degradation in consequence.  The larger ones were steadier than the extremely small, a few were even almost stationary, and one was advancing in the direction it wished to go.

He turned his back to the window, buried his face in his hands, and searched in the dim recesses of his memory for an explanation of what he had just seen.  Nothing came straight, but horror and wrath began to take possession of him.

On his way upward to the next window, invisible fingers seemed to him to be squeezing his heart and twisting it about here and there; but he never dreamed of turning back.  His mood was so grim that he did not once permit himself to pause.  Such was his physical distress by the time that he had clambered into the recess, that for several minutes he could see nothing at all—­the world seemed to be spinning round him rapidly.

When at last he looked, he saw the same sphere as before, but now all was changed on it.  It was a world of rocks, minerals, water, plants, animals, and men.  He saw the whole world at one view, yet everything was so magnified that he could distinguish the smallest details of life.  In the interior of every individual, of every aggregate of individuals, of every chemical atom, he clearly perceived the presence of the green corpuscles.  But, according to the degree of dignity of the life form, they were fragmentary or comparatively large.  In the crystal, for example, the green, imprisoned life was so minute as to be scarcely visible; in some men it was hardly bigger; but in other men and women it was twenty or a hundred times greater.  But, great or small, it played an important part in every individual.  It appeared as if the whirls of white light, which were the individuals, and plainly showed themselves beneath the enveloping bodies, were delighted with