n States saw
the star rise, an hour later it is true, but no larger than it had
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 islan