Tales of Space and Time
flood. And thus it was with millions of men that night--a flight
nowhither, with limbs heavy with heat and breath fierce and scant, and
the flood like a wall swift and white behind. And then death.
China was lit glowing white, but over Japan and Java and all the islands
of Eastern Asia the great star was a ball of dull red fire because of
the steam and smoke and ashes the volcanoes were spouting forth to
salute its coming. Above was the lava, hot gases and ash, and below the
seething floods, and the whole earth swayed and rumbled with the
earthquake shocks. Soon the immemorial snows of Thibet and the Himalaya
were melting and pouring down by ten million deepening converging
channels upon the plains of Burmah and Hindostan. The tangled summits of
the Indian jungles were aflame in a thousand places, and below the
hurrying waters around the stems were dark objects that still struggled
feebly and reflected the blood-red tongues of fire. And in a rudderless
confusion a multitude of men and women fled down the broad river-ways to
that one last hope of men--the open sea.
Larger grew the star, and larger, hotter, and brighter with a terrible
swiftness now. The tropical ocean had lost its phosphorescence, and the
whirling steam rose in ghostly wreaths from the black waves that plunged
incessantly, speckled with storm-tossed ships.
And then came a wonder. It seemed to those who in Europe watched for the
rising of the star that the world must have ceased its rotation. In a
thousand open spaces of down and upland the people who had fled thither
from the floods and the falling houses and sliding slopes of hill
watched for that rising in vain. Hour followed hour through a terrible
suspense, and the star rose not. Once again men set their eyes upon the
old constellations they had counted lost to them forever. In England it
was hot and clear overhead, though the ground quivered perpetually, 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 days the water streamed off the land, sweeping away soil
and trees and houses in the way, and piling huge dykes and scooping out
Titanic gullies over the country side. Those were the days of darkness
that followed the star and the heat. All through them, and for many
weeks and months, the earthquakes continued.
But the star had passed, and men, hunger-driven and gathering courage
only slowly, might creep back to their ruined cities, buried granaries,
and sodden fields. Such few ships as had escaped the storms of that time
came stunned and shattered and sounding their way cautiously through the
new marks and shoals of once familiar ports. And as the storms subsided
men perceived that everywhere the days were hotter than of yore, and the
sun larger, and the moon, shrunk to a third of its former size, took now
fourscore days between its new and new.
But of the new brotherhood that grew presently among men, of the saving
of laws and books and machines, of the strange change that had come over
Iceland and Greenland and the shores of Baffin's Bay, so that the
sailors coming there presently found them green and gracious, and could
scarce believe their eyes, this story does not tell. Nor of the
movement of mankind now that the earth was hotter, northward and
southward towards the poles of the earth. It concerns itself only with
the coming and the passing of the Star.
The Martian astronomers--for there are astronomers on Mars, although
they are very different beings from men--were naturally profoundly
interested by these things. They saw them from their own standpoint of
course. "Considering the mass and temperature of the missile that was
flung through our solar system into the sun," one wrote, "it is
astonishing what a little damage the earth, which it missed so narrowly,
has sustained. All the familiar continental markings and the masses of
the seas remain intact, and indeed the only difference seems to be a
shrinkage of the white discolouration (supposed to be frozen water)
round either pole." Which only shows how small the vastest of human
catastrophes may seem, at a distance of a few million miles.
A Story of the Stone Age
A STORY OF THE STONE AGE
I--UGH-LOMI AND UYA
This story is of a time beyond the memory of man, before the beginning
of history, a time when one might have walked dryshod from France (as we
call it now) to England, and when a broad and sluggish Thames flowed
through its marshes to meet its father Rhine, flowing through a wide and
level country that is under water in these latter days, and which we
know by the name of the North Sea. In that remote age the valley which
runs along the foot of the Downs did not exist, and the south of Surrey
was a range of hills, fir-clad on the middle slopes, and snow-capped for
the better part of the year. The cores of its summits still remain as
Leith Hill, and Pitch Hill, and Hindhead. On the lower slopes of the
range, below the grassy spaces where the wild horses grazed, were
forests of yew and sweet-chestnut and elm, and the thickets and dark
places hid the grizzly bear and the hyaena, and the grey apes clambered
through the branches. And still lower amidst the woodland and marsh and
open grass along the Wey did this little drama play itself out to the
end that I have to tell. Fifty thousand years ago it was, fifty thousand
years--if the reckoning of geologists is correct.
And in those days the spring-time was as joyful as it is now, and sent
the blood coursing in just the same fashion. The afternoon sky was blue
with piled white clouds sailing through it, and the southwest wind came
like a soft caress. The new-come swallows drove to and fro. The reaches
of the river were spangled with white ranunculus, the marshy places were
starred with lady's-smock and lit with marsh-mallow wherever the
regiments of the sedges lowered their swords, and the northward-moving
hippopotami, shiny black monsters, sporting clumsily, came floundering
and blundering through it all, rejoicing dimly and possessed with one
clear idea, to splash the river muddy.
Up the river and well in sight of the hippopotami, a number of little
buff-coloured animals dabbled in the water. There was no fear, no
rivalry, and no enmity between them and the hippopotami. As the great
bulks came crashing through the reeds and smashed the mirror of the
water into silvery splashes, these little creatures shouted and
gesticulated with glee. It was the surest sign of high spring. "Boloo!"
they cried. "Baayah. Boloo!" They were the children of the men folk, the
smoke of whose encampment rose from the knoll at the river's bend.
Wild-eyed youngsters they were, with matted hair and little broad-nosed
impish faces, covered (as some children are covered even nowadays) with
a delicate down of hair. They were narrow in the loins and long in the
arms. And their ears had no lobes, and had little pointed tips, a thing
that still, in rare instances, survives. Stark-naked vivid little
gipsies, as active as monkeys and as full of chatter, though a little
wanting in words.
Their elders were hidden from the wallowing hippopotami by the crest of
the knoll. The human squatting-place was a trampled area among the dead
brown fronds of Royal Fern, through which the crosiers of this year's
growth were unrolling to the light and warmth. The fire was a
smouldering heap of char, light grey and black, replenished by the old
women from time to time with brown leaves. Most of the men were
asleep--they slept sitting with their foreheads on their knees. They had
killed that morning a good quarry, enough for all, a deer that had been
wounded by hunting dogs; so that there had been no quarrelling among
them, and some of the women were still gnawing the bones that lay
scattered about. Others were making a heap of leaves and sticks to feed
Brother Fire when the darkness came again, that he might grow strong and
tall therewith, and guard them against the beasts. And two were piling
flints that they brought, an armful at a time, from the bend of the
river where the children were at play.
None of these buff-skinned savages were clothed, but some wore about
their hips rude girdles of adder-skin or crackling undressed hide, from
which depended little bags, not made, but torn from the paws of beasts,
and carrying the rudely-dressed flints that were men's chief weapons and
tools. And one woman, the mate of Uya the Cunning Man, wore a wonderful
necklace of perforated fossils--that others had worn before her. Beside
some of the sleeping men lay the big antlers of the elk, with the tines
chipped to sharp edges, and long sticks, hacked at the ends with flints
into sharp points. There was little else save these things and the
smouldering fire to mark these human beings off from the wild animals
that ranged the country. But Uya the Cunning did not sleep, but sat with
a bone in his hand and scraped busily thereon with a flint, a thing no
animal would do. He was the oldest man in the tribe, beetle-browed,
prognathous, lank-armed; he had a beard and his cheeks were hairy, and
his chest and arms were black with thick hair. And by virtue both of his
strength and cunning he was master of the tribe, and his share was
always the most and the best.
Eudena had hidden herself among the alders, because she was afraid of
Uya. She was still a girl, and her eyes were bright and her smile