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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 island and
island and swept them clear of men. Until that wave came at last--in a
blinding light and with the breath of a furnace, swift and terrible it
came--a wall of water, fifty feet high, roaring hungrily, upon the long
coasts of Asia, and swept inland across the plains of China. For a space
the star, hotter now and larger and brighter than the sun in its
strength, showed with pitiless brilliance the wide and populous country;
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