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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,
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