This question caused me some surprise.  It was certainly very strange that I had not thought of doing so.  Yet, on pondering the matter in my mind, I remembered that during my aerial journey suns and moons had been no more to me than flowers strewn on a meadow.  I now regretted that I had not sought to know something of those two fair luminaries which light and warm our earth.

Heliobas, after watching my face intently, resumed: 

“You cannot guess the reason of your omission?  I will tell you.  There is nothing to see in either Sun or Moon.  They were both inhabited worlds once; but the dwellers in the Sun have ages ago lived their lives and passed to the Central Sphere.  The Sun is nothing now but a burning world, burning rapidly, and surely, away:  or rather, it is being absorbed back into the electric circle from which it originally sprang, to be thrown out again in some new and grander form.  And so with all worlds, suns and systems, for ever and ever.  Hundreds of thousands of those brief time-breathings called years may pass before this consummation of the Sun; but its destruction is going on now, or rather its absorption—­and we on our cold small star warm ourselves, and are glad, in the light of an empty world on fire!”

I listened with awe and interest.

“And the Moon?” I asked eagerly.

“The Moon does not exist.  What we see is the reflection or the electrograph of what she once was.  Atmospherical electricity has imprinted this picture of a long-ago living world upon the heavens, just as Raphael drew his cartoons for the men of to-day to see.”

“But,” I exclaimed in surprise, “how about the Moon’s influence on the tides? and what of eclipses?”

“Not the Moon, but the electric photograph of a once living but now absorbed world, has certainly an influence on the tides.  The sea is impregnated with electricity.  Just as the Sun will absorb colours, so the electricity in the sea is repelled or attracted by the electric picture of the Moon in Heaven.  Because, as a painting is full of colour, so is that faithful sketch of a vanished sphere, drawn with a pencil of pure light, full of immense electricity; and to carry the simile further, just as a painting may be said to be formed of various dark and light tints, so the electric portrait of the Moon contains various degrees of electric force—­which, coming in contact with the electricity of the Earth’s atmosphere, produces different effects on us and on the natural scenes amid which we dwell.  As for eclipses—­if you slowly pass a round screen between yourself and a blazing fire, you will only see the edges of the fire.  In the same way the electrograph of the Moon passes at stated intervals between the Earth and the burning world of the Sun.”