THE UNIVERSE OUR HOME 117 



The sunset glow would fade away. Star after 

 star would spring into sight till the whole vault of 

 heaven was glistening with diamond points of light. 

 Above me and all round me stars were shining out 

 of the deep sapphire sky with a brilliance only sur- 

 passed by the stars in the high Himalayan solitudes 

 I have already described. And a great stillness 

 would be over all — a silence even completer than 

 the silence among the mountains, for there it was 

 often broken by creaking of the ice, whereas here 

 in the desert it was so profound that, when at the end 

 of many weeks I arrived at a patch of grass and 

 trees, the twittering of the birds and the whirr of 

 insects sounded like the roar of a London street. 



In this unbroken stillness and with the eye free 

 to rove all round with nothing in any direction to 

 stay its vision, and being as I was many weeks' 

 distance from any settled human habitation, I often 

 had the feeling of "being more connected with the 

 starry firmament than with this Earth. In a 

 curious way the bodily and the material seemed to 

 exist no longer, and I would be in spirit among the 

 stars. They served to guide us over the desert and 

 I gradually became familiar with them. And I 

 used to feel as much a part of the Stellar World as 

 of- this Earth. I lost all sense of being confined to 

 Earth and took my place in the Universe at large. 

 My home was the whole great Cosmos before me. 

 The Cosmos, and not the Earth, was the whole to 

 which I belonged. 



And in that unbroken quiet and amid this bright 

 company of heaven my spirit seemed to beconie 

 intenser and more daring. Right high up in the 



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