d and island and swept them clear of men. Until
that wave came at last--in a blinding light and with the breath of
a furnace, swift and terrible it came--a wall of water, fifty feet
high, roaring hungrily, upon the long coasts of Asia, and swept
inland across the plains of China. For a space the star, hotter
now and larger and brighter than the sun in its strength, showed
with pitiless brilliance the wide and populous country; towns and
villages with their pagodas and trees, roads, wide cultivated
fields, millions of sleepless people staring in helpless terror at
the incandescent sky; and then, low and growing, came the murmur of
the flood. And thus it was with millions of men that night--a
flight nowhither, with limbs heavy with heat and breath fierce and
scant, and the flood like a wall swift and white behind. And then
death.

China was lit glowing white, but over Japan and Java and all
the islands of Eastern Asia the great star was a ball of dull red
fire because of the steam and smoke and ashes the volcanoes were
spouting forth to salute its coming. Above was the lava, hot gases
and ash, and below the seething floods, and the whole earth swayed
and rumbled with the earthquake shocks. Soon the immemorial snows
of Thibet and the Himalaya were melting and pouring down by ten
million deepening converging channels upon the plains of Burmah and
Hindostan. The tangled summits of the Indian jungles were aflame
in a thousand places, and below the hurrying waters around the
stems were dark objects that still struggled feebly and reflected
the blood-red tongues of fire. And in a rudderless confusion a
multitude of men and women fled down the broad river-ways to that
one last hope of men--the open sea.

Larger grew the star, and larger, hotter, and brighter with a
terrible swiftness now. The tropical ocean had lost its
phosphorescence, and the whirling steam rose in ghostly wreaths
from the black waves that plunged incessantly, speckled with
storm-tossed ships.

And then came a wonder. It seemed to those who in Europe
watched for the rising of the star that the world must have ceased
its rotation. In a thousand open spaces of down and upland the
people who had fled thither from the floods and the falling houses
and sliding slopes of hill watched for that rising in vain. Hour
followed hour through a terrible suspense, and the star rose not.
Once again men set their eyes upon the old constellations they had
coun