ad been the night
before, there were still plenty awake to laugh at the master
mathematician--to take the danger as if it had passed.

But hereafter the laughter ceased. The star grew--it grew with a
terrible steadiness hour after hour, a little larger each hour, a little
nearer the midnight zenith, and brighter and brighter, until it had
turned night into a second day. Had it come straight to the earth
instead of in a curved path, had it lost no velocity to Jupiter, it must
have leapt the intervening gulf in a day, but as it was it took five
days altogether to come by our planet. The next night it had become a
third the size of the moon before it set to English eyes, and the thaw
was assured. It rose over America near the size of the moon, but
blinding white to look at, and _hot_; and a breath of hot wind blew now
with its rising and gathering strength, and in Virginia, and Brazil, and
down the St. Lawrence valley, it shone intermittently through a driving
reek of thunder-clouds, flickering violet lightning, and hail
unprecedented. In Manitoba was a thaw and devastating floods. And upon
all the mountains of the earth the snow and ice began to melt that
night, and all the rivers coming out of high country flowed thick and
turbid, and soon--in their upper reaches--with swirling trees and the
bodies of beasts and men. They rose steadily, steadily in the ghostly
brilliance, and came trickling over their banks at last, behind the
flying population of their valleys.

And along the coast of Argentina and up the South Atlantic the tides
were higher than had ever been in the memory of man, and the storms
drove the waters in many cases scores of miles inland, drowning whole
cities. And so great grew the heat during the night that the rising of
the sun was like the coming of a shadow. The earthquakes began and grew
until all down America from the Arctic Circle to Cape Horn, hillsides
were sliding, fissures were opening, and houses and walls crumbling to
destruction. The whole side of Cotopaxi slipped out in one vast
convulsion, and a tumult of lava poured out so high and broad and swift
and liquid that in one day it reached the sea.

So the star, with the wan moon in its wake, marched across the Pacific,
trailed the thunderstorms like the hem of a robe, and the growing tidal
wave that toiled behind it, frothing and eager, poured over island and
island and swept them clear of men. Until that wave came at last--in a
blinding lig