<h3><SPAN name="II" id="II"></SPAN>II</h3>
<h2>THE CATASTROPHE</h2>
<p>On several occasions already the sun had given evident signs of
weakness. From year to year his spots increased in size and number, and
his heat sensibly diminished. People were lost in conjecture. Was his
fuel giving out? Had he just traversed in his journey through space an
exceptionally cold region? No one knew. Whatever the reason was, the
public concerned itself little about the matter, as in all that is
gradual and not sudden. The "solar anæmia," which moreover restored some
degree of animation to neglected astronomy, had merely become the
subject of several rather smart articles in the reviews. In general, the
<i>savants</i>, in their well-warmed studies, affected to disbelieve in the
fall of temperature, and, in spite of the formal indications of the
thermometer, they did not cease to repeat that the dogma of slow
evolution, and of the conservation of energy combined with the classical
nebular hypothesis, forbade the admission of a sufficiently rapid
cooling of the solar mass to make itself felt during the short duration
of a century, much more so during that of five years or a year. A few
unorthodox persons of heretical and pessimistic temperament remarked, it
is true, that at different epochs, if one believed the astronomers of
the remote past, certain stars had gradually burnt out in the heavens,
or had passed from the most dazzling brilliance to an almost complete
obscurity, during the course of barely a single year. They therefore
concluded that the case of our sun had nothing exceptional about it;
that the theory of slow-footed evolution was not perhaps universally
applicable; and that, sometimes, as an old visionary mystic called
Cuvier had ventured to put forward in legendary times, veritable
revolutions took place in the heavens as well as on earth. But orthodox
science combated with indignation these audacious theories.</p>
<p>However, the winter of 2489 was so disastrous, it was actually necessary
to take the threatening predictions of the alarmists seriously. One
reached the point of fearing at any moment a "solar apoplexy." That was
the title of a sensational pamphlet which went through twenty thousand
editions. The return of the spring was anxiously awaited.</p>
<p>The spring returned at last, and the starry monarch reappeared, but his
golden crown was gone, and he himself well-nigh unrecognisable. He was
entirely red. The meadows were no longer green, the sky was no longer
blue, the Chinese were no longer yellow, all had suddenly changed colour
as in a transformation scene. Then, by degrees, from the red that he was
he became orange. He might then have been compared to a golden apple in
the sky, and so during several years he was seen to pass, and all nature
with him, through a thousand magnificent or terrible tints—from orange
to yellow, from yellow to green, and from green at length to indigo and
pale blue. The meteorologists then recalled the fact, in the year 1883,
on the second of September, the sun had appeared in Venezuela the whole
day long as blue as the moon. So many colours, so many new decorations
of the chameleon-like universe which dazzled the terrified eye, which
revived and restored to its primitive sharpness the rejuvenated
sensation of the beauties of nature, and strongly stirred the depths of
men's souls by renewing the former aspect of things.</p>
<p>At the same time disaster succeeded disaster. The entire population of
Norway, Northern Russia, and Siberia perished, frozen to death in a
single night; the temperate zone was decimated, and what was left of its
inhabitants fled before the enormous drifts of snow and ice, and
emigrated by hundreds of millions towards the tropics, crowding into the
panting trains, several of which, overtaken by tornadoes of snow,
disappeared for ever.</p>
<p>The telegraph successively informed the capital, now that there was no
longer any news of immense trains caught in the tunnels under the
Pyrenees, the Alps, the Caucasus, or Himalayas, in which they were
imprisoned by enormous avalanches, which blocked simultaneously the two
issues; now that some of the largest rivers of the world—the Rhine, for
instance, and the Danube—had ceased to flow, completely frozen to the
bottom, from which resulted a drought, followed by an indescribable
famine, which obliged thousands of mothers to devour their own children.
From time to time a country or continent broke off suddenly its
communication with the central agency, the reason being that an entire
telegraphic section was buried under the snow, from which at intervals
emerged the uneven tops of their posts, with their little cups of
porcelain. Of this immense network of electricity which enveloped in its
close meshes the entire globe, as of that prodigious coat of mail with
which the complicated system of railways clothed the earth, there was
only left some scattered fragments, like the remnant of the Grand Army
of Napoleon during the retreat from Russia.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the glaciers of the Alps, the Andes, and of all the mountains
of the world hitherto vanquished by the sun, which for several thousand
centuries had been thrust back into their last entrenchments, resumed
their triumphant march. All the glaciers that had been dead since the
geological ages came to life again, more colossal than ever. From all
the valleys in the Alps or Pyrenees, that were lately green and peopled
with delightful health resorts, there issued these snowy hordes, these
streams of icy lava, with their frontal moraine advancing as it spread
over the plain, a moving cliff composed of rocks and overturned engines,
of the wreckage of bridges, stations, hotels and public edifices,
whirled along in the wildest confusion, a heart-breaking welter of
gigantic bric-à-brac, with which the triumphant invasion decked itself
out as with the loot of victory. Slowly, step by step, in spite of
sundry transient intervals of light and warmth, in spite of occasionally
scorching days which bore witness to the supreme convulsions of the sun
in its battle against death, which revived in men's souls misleading
hopes, athwart and even by means of these unexpected changes the pale
invaders advanced. They retook and recovered one by one all their
ancient realms in the glacial period, and if they found on the road some
gigantic vagrant block lying in sullen solitude, near some famous city,
a hundred leagues from its native hills, mysterious witness of the
immense catastrophe of former times, they raised it and bore it onward,
cradling it on their unyielding waves, as an advancing army recaptures
and enfurls its ancient flags, all covered with dust, which it has found
again in its enemies' sanctuaries.</p>
<p>But what was the glacial period compared with this new crisis of the
globe and the sky? Doubtless it had been due to a similar attack of
weakness, to a similar failure of the sun, and many species of animals
had necessarily perished at the time, from being insufficiently clad.
That had been, however, but a warning bell, so to say, a simple
notification of the final and fatal attack. The glacial periods—for we
know there have been several—now explained themselves by their
reappearance on a large scale. But this clearing up of an obscure point
in geology was, one must admit, an insufficient compensation for the
public disasters which were its price.</p>
<p>What calamities! What horrors! My pen confesses its impotence to retrace
them. Besides how can we tell the story of disasters which were so
complete they often simultaneously overwhelmed under snow-drifts a
hundred yards deep all that witnessed them, to the very last man. All
that we know for certain is what took place at the time towards the end
of the twenty-fifth century in a little district of Arabia Petræa.</p>
<p>Thither had flocked for refuge, in one horde after another, wave after
wave, with host upon host frozen one on the top of another, as they
advanced, the few millions of human creatures who survived of the
hundreds of millions that had disappeared. Arabia Petræa had, therefore,
along with the Sahara, become the most populous country of the globe.
They transported hither by reason of the relative warmth of its climate,
I will not say the seat of Government—for, alas! Terror alone
reigned—but an immense stove which took its place, and whatever
remained of Babylon now covered over by a glacier. A new town was
constructed in a few months on the plans of an entirely new system of
architecture, marvellously adapted for the struggle against the cold. By
the most happy of chances some rich and unworked coal mines were
discovered on the spot. There was enough fuel there, it seems, to
provide warmth for many years to come. And as for food, it was not as
yet too pressing a question. The granaries contained several sacks of
corn, while waiting for the sun to revive and the corn to sprout again.
The sun had certainly revived after the glacial periods; why should it
not do so again? asked the optimists.</p>
<p>It was but the hope of a day. The sun assumed a violet hue. The frozen
corn ceased to be eatable. The cold became so intense that the walls of
the houses as they contracted cracked and admitted blasts of air which
killed the inhabitants on the spot. A physicist affirmed that he saw
crystals of solid nitrogen and oxygen fall from the sky which gave rise
to the fear that the atmosphere would shortly become decomposed. The
seas were already frozen solid. A hundred thousand human creatures
huddling around the huge government stove, which was no longer equal to
restoring their circulation, were turned into icicles in a single night;
and the night following, a second hundred thousand perished likewise. Of
the beautiful human race, so strong and noble, formed by so many
centuries of effort and genius by such an intelligent and extended
selection, there would soon have been only left a few thousands, a few
hundreds of haggard and trembling specimens, unique trustees of the last
ruins of what had once been civilisation.</p>
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