, but
in the tropics, Sirius and Capella and Aldebaran showed through a veil
of steam. And when at last the great star rose near ten hours late, the
sun rose close upon it, and in the centre of its white heart was a disc
of black.

Over Asia it was the star had begun to fall behind the movement of the
sky, and then suddenly, as it hung over India, its light had been
veiled. All the plain of India from the mouth of the Indus to the mouths
of the Ganges was a shallow waste of shining water that night, out of
which rose temples and palaces, mounds and hills, black with people.
Every minaret was a clustering mass of people, who fell one by one into
the turbid waters, as heat and terror overcame them. The whole land
seemed a-wailing, and suddenly there swept a shadow across that furnace
of despair, and a breath of cold wind, and a gathering of clouds, out of
the cooling air. Men looking up, near blinded, at the star, saw that a
black disc was creeping across the light. It was the moon, coming
between the star and the earth. 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