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towns and villages with their pagodas and trees, roads, wide cultivated
fields, millions of sleepless people staring in helpless terror at the
incandescent sky; and then, low and growing, came the murmur of the
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.
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