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 passed. Already it
was receding, swifter and swifter, in the last stage of its
headlong journey downward into the sun.

And then the clouds gathered, blotting out the vision of the
sky, the thunder and lightning wove a garment round the world; all
over the earth was such a downpour of rain as men had never before
seen, and where the volcanoes flared red against the cloud canopy
there descended torrents of mud. Everywhere the waters were
pouring off the land, leaving mud-silted ruins, and the earth
littered like a storm-worn beach with all that had floated, and the
dead bodies of the men and brutes, its children. For days the
water streamed off the land, sweeping away soil and trees and
houses in the way, and piling huge dykes and scooping out Titanic