motion, the only regions which
would certainly be exempt being the colder regions of the Arctic
circles, where the vapour of the acid would assume the liquid state, and
fall as rain. He did not anticipate that vegetation would be permanently
affected, unless the eruption were of inconceivable duration and
activity, for though the poisonous quality of hydrocyanic acid consisted
in its sudden and complete arrest of oxidation, vegetation had two
sources of life--the soil as well as the air; with this exception, all
life, down to the lowest evolutionary forms, would disappear (here was
the one point in which he was somewhat at fault), until the earth
reproduced them. For the rest, he fixed the rate of the on-coming cloud
at from 100 to 105 miles a day; and the date of eruption, either the
14th, 15th, or 16th of April--which was either one, two, or three days
after the arrival of the _Boreal_ party at the Pole; and he concluded by
saying that, if the facts were as he had stated them, then he could
suggest no hiding-place for the race of man, unless such places as mines
and tunnels could be made air-tight; nor could even they be of use to
any considerable number, except in the event of the poisonous state of
the air being of very short duration.

* * * * *

I had thought of mines before: but in a very languid way, till this
article, and other things that I read, as it were struck my brain a slap
with the notion. For 'there,' I said, 'if anywhere, shall I find a
man....'

* * * * *

I went out from that building that morning feeling like a man bowed down
with age, for the depths of unutterable horror into which I had had
glimpses during that one night made me very feeble, and my steps
tottered, and my brain reeled.

I got out into Farringdon Street, and at the near Circus, where four
streets meet, had under my furthest range of vision nothing but four
fields of bodies, bodies, clad in a rag-shop of every faded colour, or
half-clad, or not clad at all, actually, in many cases, over-lying one
another, as I had seen at Reading, but here with a markedly more
skeleton appearance: for I saw the swollen-looking shoulders, sharp
hips, hollow abdomens, and stiff bony limbs of people dead from famine,
the whole having the grotesque air of some _macabre_ battle-field of
fallen marionettes. Mixed with these was an extraordinary number of
vehicles of all sorts, so that I