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reaches--with swirling trees and the bodies of beasts and men. They rose
steadily, steadily in the ghostly brilliance, and came trickling over their
banks at last, behind the flying population of their valleys.
And along the coast of Argentina and up the South Atlantic the tides were
higher than had ever been in the memory of man, and the storms drove the
waters in many cases scores of miles inland, drowning whole cities. And so
great grew the heat during the night that the rising of the sun was like the
coming of a shadow. The earthquakes began and grew until all down America from
the Arctic Circle to Cape Horn, hillsides were sliding, fissures were opening,
and houses and walls crumbling to destruction. The whole side of Cotopaxi
slipped out in one vast convulsion, and a tumult of lava poured out so high
and broad and swift and liquid that in one day it reached the sea.
So the star, with the wan moon in its wake, marched across the Pacific,
trailed the thunderstorms like the hem of a robe, and the growing tidal wave
that toiled behind it, frothing and eager, poured over island and island and
swept them clear of men. Until that wave came at last--in a blinding light and
with the breath of a furnace, swift and terrible it came --a wall of water,
fifty feet high, roaring hungrily, upon the long coasts of Asia, and swept
inland across the plains of China. For a space the star, hotter now and larger
and brighter than the sun in its strength, showed with pitiless brilliance the
wide and populous country; towns and villages with their pagodas and trees,
roads, wide cultivated fields, millions of sleepless people staring in
helpless terror at the incandescent sky; and then, low and growing, came the
murmur of the flood. And thus it was with millions of men that night--a flight
nowhither, with limbs heavy with heat and breath fierce and scant, and the
flood like a wall swift and white behind. And then death.
China was lit glowing white, but over Japan and Java and all the islands of
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Eastern Asia the great star was a ball of dull red fire because of the steam
and smoke and ashes the volcanoes were spouting forth to salute its coming.
Above was the lava, hot gases and ash, and below the seething floods, and the
whole earth swayed and rumbled with the earthquake shocks. Soon the immemorial
snows of Thibet and the Himalaya were melting and pouring down by ten million
deepening converging channels upon the plains of Burmah and Hindostan. The
tangled summits of the Indian jungles were aflame in a thousand places, and
below the hurrying waters around the stems were dark objects that still
struggled feebly and reflected the blood-red tongues of fire. And in a
rudderless confusion a multitude of men and women fled down the broad
river-ways to that one last hope of men--the open sea.
Larger grew the star, and larger, hotter, and brighter with a terrible
swiftness now. The tropical ocean had lost its phosphorescence, and the
whirling steam rose in ghostly wreaths from the black waves that plunged
incessantly, speckled with storm-tossed ships.
And then came a wonder. It seemed to those who in Europe watched for the
rising of the star that the world must have ceased its rotation. In a thousand
open spaces of down and upland the people who had fled thither from the floods
and the falling houses and sliding slopes of hill watched for that rising in
vain. Hour followed hour through a terrible suspense, and the star rose not.
Once again men set their eyes upon the old constellations they had counted
lost to them forever. In England it was hot and clear overhead, though the
ground quivered perpetually, but in the tropics, Sirius and Capella and
Aldebaran showed through a veil of steam. And when at last the great star rose
near ten hours late, the sun rose close upon it, and in the centre of its
white heart was a disc of black.
Over Asia it was the star had begun to fall behind the movement of the sky,
and then suddenly, as it hung over India, its light had been veiled. All the
plain of India from the mouth of the Indus to the mouths of the Ganges was a
shallow waste of shining water that night, out of which rose temples and
palaces, mounds and hills, black with people. Every minaret was a clustering
mass of people, who fell one by one into the turbid waters, as heat and terror
overcame them. The whole land seemed a-wailing and suddenly there swept a
shadow across that furnace of despair, and a breath of cold wind, and a
gathering of clouds, out of the cooling air. Men looking up, near blinded, at
the star, saw that a black disc was creeping across the light. It was the
moon, coming between the star and the earth. And even as men cried to God at
this respite, out of the East with a strange inexplicable swiftness sprang the
sun. And then star, sun and moon rushed together across the heavens.
So it was that presently, to the European watchers, star and sun rose close
upon each other, drove headlong for a space and then slower, and at last came
to rest, star and sun merged into one glare of flame at the zenith of the sky.
The moon no longer eclipsed the star but was lost to sight in the brilliance
of the sky. And though those who were still alive regarded it for the most
part with that dull stupidity that hunger, fatigue, heat and despair engender,
there were still men who could perceive the meaning of these signs. Star and
earth had been at their nearest, had swung about one another, and the star had
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