h. And even as men cried to God at this respite, out of the East
with a strange inexplicable swiftness sprang the sun. And then star, sun,
and moon rushed together across the heavens.

So it was that presently to the European watchers star and sun rose close
upon each other, drove headlong for a space and then slower, and at last
came to rest, star and sun merged into one glare of flame at the zenith of
the sky. The moon no longer eclipsed the star but was lost to sight in the
brilliance of the sky. And though those who were still alive regarded it
for the most part with that dull stupidity that hunger, fatigue, heat and
despair engender, there were still men who could perceive the meaning of
these signs. Star and earth had been at their nearest, had swung about one
another, and the star had passed. Already it was receding, swifter and
swifter, in the last stage of its headlong journey downward into the sun.

And then the clouds gathered, blotting out the vision of the sky, the
thunder and lightning wove a garment round the world; all over the earth
was such a downpour of rain as men had never before seen, and where the
volcanoes flared red against the cloud canopy there descended torrents of
mud. Everywhere the waters were pouring off the land, leaving mud-silted
ruins, and the earth 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 th