and snow, destitute of all life,
except a few wild and hardy white-clothed birds and beasts. Even from
the mountain peaks you may see the spires and walls of an ice-encased,
long dead city.

Near the city is a lesser range, upon which to their very tops grow
dense groves of palm and other fern-like trees. In the shelter of these
groves are many villas of the rich.

Upon the highest of this range and near our granite quarries I have
decided to build the pyramid. The task of building, beginning today,
will be pushed with the utmost speed.

The road leading from the city to the top and from the quarries we
broadened and regraded. The site was cleared and leveled and the basal
walls, six hundred and eighty feet square, started. The height is to be
three hundred and fifty feet and the wall angle is approximately
forty-seven degrees.

During the building there was much sickness and many deaths from
starvation and hardship, for all of which I was held responsible, and
until the laboring-people swore at and called me Santa, The Terrible.

Each day the pyramid grew in size; and each night seemed slightly colder
than the one preceding it. It was reported that the snow on the distant
mountain peaks was deeper than ever before.

We now used the lower stories of the pyramid as a storeroom for fuel and
grain and were forced constantly to maintain a heavy guard to keep the
half-starved populace from stealing our supplies. I had executed more
than a dozen who were caught attempting to steal food stored for their
betters.

The warm ocean current shifted to the west. The sun was overcast by
clouds. The earth trembled. The snow line crept down the mountain range.
The land seemed slowly sinking into the sea. The people shook from fear
and cold.

It was necessary to push the work, and, in their terror and to satisfy
their hunger, the whole population labored on the pyramid.

One night, when the pyramid was three hundred feet high, a light snow,
the first, covered pyramid mountain. A few weeks later there was another
and the next morning there was thin ice.

A swift-running mountain river separated pyramid mountain and the city
of Theni from the foothills of the distant range. Gradually the current
disappeared. The river became a salt lake, then a bay of the great
western sea.

One night there was an earthquake, in which we feared for the
destruction of the pyramid, and in which a number of the houses of the
city toppled over