across the gulf of space

[sergebroom]

"...No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were being scrutinised and studied, perhaps as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. (...) Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic , regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us..."

- from The War of the Worlds, by H.G.Wells