littered like a storm-worn beach with all that had floated, and the
dead bodies of the men and brutes, its children. For days the
water streamed off the land, sweeping away soil and trees and
houses in the way, and piling huge dykes and scooping out Titanic
gullies over the country side. Those were the days of darkness
that followed the star and the heat. All through them, and for
many weeks and months, the earthquakes continued.

But the star had passed, and men, hunger-driven and gathering
courage only slowly, might creep back to their ruined cities,
buried granaries, and sodden fields. Such few ships as had escaped
the storms of that time came stunned and shattered and sounding
their way cautiously through the new marks and shoals of once
familiar ports. And as the storms subsided men perceived that
everywhere the days were hotter than of yore, and the sun larger,
and the moon, shrunk to a third of its former size, took now
fourscore days between its new and new.

But of the new brotherhood that grew presently among men, of
the saving of laws and books and machines, of the strange change
that had come over Iceland and Greenland and the shores of Baffin's
Bay, so that the sailors coming there presently found them green
and gracious, and could scarce believe their eyes, this story does
not tell. Nor of the movement of mankind now that the earth was
hotter, northward and southward towards the poles of the earth. It
concerns itself only with the coming and the passing of the Star.

The Martian astronomers--for there are astronomers on Mars,
although they are very different beings from men--were naturally
profoundly interested by these things. They saw them from their
own standpoint of course. "Considering the mass and temperature of
the missile that was flung through our solar system into the sun,"
one wrote, "it is astonishing what a little damage the earth, which
it missed so narrowly, has sustained. All the familiar continental
markings and the masses of the seas remain intact, and indeed the
only difference seems to be a shrinkage of the white discoloration
(supposed to be frozen water) round either pole." Which only shows
how small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem, at a distance
of a few million miles.

A DREAM OF ARMAGEDDON

The man with the white face entered the carriage at Rugby. He
moved slowly in spite of the urgency of his porter, and even while
he was still on the platform