It was stationary again.
"We've stopped!" he said, after a pause of several moments. "Now, if the
body that's taken us out of our course is moving away from us we win, if
it's coming towards us we lose. At any rate, we've done all we can. 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.
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