s time, I began to have a lively, though
morbid, curiosity, as to what would happen when the end came--but I
seemed strangely without imaginings.

All this while, the steady process of decay was continuing. The few
remaining pieces of glass, had long ago vanished; and, every now and
then, a soft thud, and a little cloud of rising dust, would tell of some
fragment of fallen mortar or stone.

I looked up again, to the fiery sheet that quaked in the heavens above
me and far down into the Southern sky. As I looked, the impression was
borne in upon me, that it had lost some of its first brilliancy--that it
was duller, deeper hued.

I glanced down, once more, to the blurred white of the worldscape.
Sometimes, my look returned to the burning sheet of dulling flame, that
was, and yet hid, the sun. At times, I glanced behind me, into the
growing dusk of the great, silent room, with its aeon-carpet of
sleeping dust....

So, I watched through the fleeting ages, lost in soul-wearing thoughts
and wonderings, and possessed with a new weariness.

_XVII_

THE SLOWING ROTATION

It might have been a million years later, that I perceived, beyond
possibility of doubt, that the fiery sheet that lit the world, was
indeed darkening.

Another vast space went by, and the whole enormous flame had sunk to a
deep, copper color. Gradually, it darkened, from copper to copper-red,
and from this, at times, to a deep, heavy, purplish tint, with, in it, a
strange loom of blood.

Although the light was decreasing, I could perceive no diminishment in
the apparent speed of the sun. It still spread itself in that dazzling
veil of speed.

The world, so much of it as I could see, had assumed a dreadful shade
of gloom, as though, in very deed, the last day of the worlds
approached.

The sun was dying; of that there could be little doubt; and still the
earth whirled onward, through space and all the aeons. At this time, I
remember, an extraordinary sense of bewilderment took me. I found
myself, later, wandering, mentally, amid an odd chaos of fragmentary
modern theories and the old Biblical story of the world's ending.

Then, for the first time, there flashed across me, the memory that the
sun, with its system of planets, was, and had been, traveling through
space at an incredible speed. Abruptly, the question rose--_Where?_ For
a very great time, I pondered this matter; but, finally, with a certain
sense of the futility of my puzzlings, I