poleon during the retreat from Russia.

Meanwhile, the glaciers of the Alps, the Andes, and of all the mountains
of the world hitherto vanquished by the sun, which for several thousand
centuries had been thrust back into their last entrenchments, resumed
their triumphant march. All the glaciers that had been dead since the
geological ages came to life again, more colossal than ever. From all
the valleys in the Alps or Pyrenees, that were lately green and peopled
with delightful health resorts, there issued these snowy hordes, these
streams of icy lava, with their frontal moraine advancing as it spread
over the plain, a moving cliff composed of rocks and overturned engines,
of the wreckage of bridges, stations, hotels and public edifices,
whirled along in the wildest confusion, a heart-breaking welter of
gigantic bric-a-brac, with which the triumphant invasion decked itself
out as with the loot of victory. Slowly, step by step, in spite of
sundry transient intervals of light and warmth, in spite of occasionally
scorching days which bore witness to the supreme convulsions of the sun
in its battle against death, which revived in men's souls misleading
hopes, athwart and even by means of these unexpected changes the pale
invaders advanced. They retook and recovered one by one all their
ancient realms in the glacial period, and if they found on the road some
gigantic vagrant block lying in sullen solitude, near some famous city,
a hundred leagues from its native hills, mysterious witness of the
immense catastrophe of former times, they raised it and bore it onward,
cradling it on their unyielding waves, as an advancing army recaptures
and enfurls its ancient flags, all covered with dust, which it has found
again in its enemies' sanctuaries.

But what was the glacial period compared with this new crisis of the
globe and the sky? Doubtless it had been due to a similar attack of
weakness, to a similar failure of the sun, and many species of animals
had necessarily perished at the time, from being insufficiently clad.
That had been, however, but a warning bell, so to say, a simple
notification of the final and fatal attack. The glacial periods--for we
know there have been several--now explained themselves by their
reappearance on a large scale. But this clearing up of an obscure point
in geology was, one must admit, an insufficient compensation for the
public disasters which were its price.

What calamities! What horrors! My p