Chinese were no longer yellow, all had suddenly changed colour
as in a transformation scene. Then, by degrees, from the red that he was
he became orange. He might then have been compared to a golden apple in
the sky, and so during several years he was seen to pass, and all nature
with him, through a thousand magnificent or terrible tints--from orange
to yellow, from yellow to green, and from green at length to indigo and
pale blue. The meteorologists then recalled the fact, in the year 1883,
on the second of September, the sun had appeared in Venezuela the whole
day long as blue as the moon. So many colours, so many new decorations
of the chameleon-like universe which dazzled the terrified eye, which
revived and restored to its primitive sharpness the rejuvenated
sensation of the beauties of nature, and strongly stirred the depths of
men's souls by renewing the former aspect of things.

At the same time disaster succeeded disaster. The entire population of
Norway, Northern Russia, and Siberia perished, frozen to death in a
single night; the temperate zone was decimated, and what was left of its
inhabitants fled before the enormous drifts of snow and ice, and
emigrated by hundreds of millions towards the tropics, crowding into the
panting trains, several of which, overtaken by tornadoes of snow,
disappeared for ever.

The telegraph successively informed the capital, now that there was no
longer any news of immense trains caught in the tunnels under the
Pyrenees, the Alps, the Caucasus, or Himalayas, in which they were
imprisoned by enormous avalanches, which blocked simultaneously the two
issues; now that some of the largest rivers of the world--the Rhine, for
instance, and the Danube--had ceased to flow, completely frozen to the
bottom, from which resulted a drought, followed by an indescribable
famine, which obliged thousands of mothers to devour their own children.
From time to time a country or continent broke off suddenly its
communication with the central agency, the reason being that an entire
telegraphic section was buried under the snow, from which at intervals
emerged the uneven tops of their posts, with their little cups of
porcelain. Of this immense network of electricity which enveloped in its
close meshes the entire globe, as of that prodigious coat of mail with
which the complicated system of railways clothed the earth, there was
only left some scattered fragments, like the remnant of the Grand Army
of Na