ere is nowhere else to get them.

And yet to Rodriguez and Morano all that they saw seemed wholly and
hideously evil.

How long they may have watched there they tried to guess afterwards,
but as they looked on those terrific scenes they had no way to separate
days from minutes: nothing about them seemed to escape destruction, and
time itself seemed no calmer than were those shuddering mountains.

Then the thundering ranges passed; and afterwards there came a gleaming
mountain, one huge and lonely peak, seemingly all of gold. Had our
whole world been set beside it and shaped as it was shaped, that golden
mountain would yet have towered above it: it would have taken our moon
as well to reach that flashing peak. It rode on toward them in its
golden majesty, higher than all the flames, save now and then when some
wild gas seemed to flee from the dread earthquakes of the Sun, and was
overtaken in the height by fire, even above that mountain.

As that mass of gold that was higher than all the world drew near to
Rodriguez and Morano they felt its unearthly menace; and though it
could not overcome their spirits they knew there was a hideous terror
about it. It was in its awful scale that its terror lurked for any
creature of our planet. Though they could not quake or tremble they
felt that terror. The mountain dwarfed Earth.

Man knows his littleness, his own mountains remind him; many countries
are small, and some nations: but the dreams of Man make up for our
faults and failings, for the brevity of our lives, for the narrowness
of our scope; they leap over boundaries and are away and away. But this
great mountain belittled the world and all: who gazed on it knew all
his dreams to be puny. Before this mountain Man seemed a trivial thing,
and Earth, and all the dreams Man had of himself and his home.

The golden mass drew opposite those two watchers and seemed to
challenge with its towering head the pettiness of the tiny world they
knew. And then the whole gleaming mountain gave one shudder and fell
into the awful plains of the Sun. Straight down before Rodriguez and
Morano it slipped roaring, till the golden peak was gone, and the
molten plain closed over it; and only ripples remained, the size of
Europe, as when a tumbling river strikes the rocks of its bed and on
its surface heaving circles widen and disappear. And then, as though
this horror left nothing more to be shown, they felt the Professor
beckon to them from Ea