II
THE CATASTROPHE
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 savants, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 snowdrifts 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 Petraea.
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 Petraea 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 severa
l 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.
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.
III
THE STRUGGLE
IN this extremity a man arose who did not despair of humanity. His name has been preserved for us. By a singular coincidence he was called Miltiades, like another saviour of Hellenism. He was not, however, of Hellenic race. A cross between a Slave and a Breton he had only half sympathised with the prosperity of the Neo-Græcian world with its levelling and enervating tendencies, and amid this wholesale obliteration of previous civilisation, and universal triumph of a kind of Byzantine renaissance brought up to date, he belonged to those who reverently guarded in the depths of their heart the germs of recusancy. But, like the barbarian stilicho, the last defender of the foundering Roman world against the barbaric hordes, it was precisely this disbeliever in civilisation who alone undertook to arrest it on the brink of its vast downfall. Eloquent and handsome, but nearly always taciturn, he was not without certain resemblances in pose and features, so it was said, to Chateaubriand and Napoleon (two celebrities, as one knows, who in their time were famous throughout an entire continent). Worshipped by the women of whom he was the hope, and by the men who stood greatly in awe of him, he had early kept the crowd at arm’s length, and a singular accident had doubled his natural shyness. Finding the sea less monotonously dull at any rate than terra firma, and in any case more unconfined, he had passed his youth on board the last iron-clad of State of which he was captain, in patrolling the coasts of continents, in dreaming of impossible adventures, and of conquests when all was conquered, of discoveries of America when all was discovered, and in cursing all former travellers, discoverers and conquerors, fortunate reapers in all the fields of glory in which there was nothing more left to glean. One day, however, he believed he had discovered a new island—it was a mistake—and he had the joy of engaging in a fight, the last of which ancient history makes mention, with an apparently highly primitive tribe of savages, who spoke English and read the Bible. In this fight he displayed such valour that he was unanimously pronounced to be mad by his crew, and was in great danger of losing his rank after a specialist in insanity, who had been called in, was on the point of publicly confirming popular opinion by declaring he was suffering from suicidal mono-mania of a novel kind. Luckily an archæologist protested and showed by actual documents that this phenomenon, which had become so unusual but was frequent in past ages under the name of bravery, was a simple case of ancestral reversion sufficiently serious to merit examination. As luck would have it, the unfortunate Miltiades had been wounded in the face in the same encounter; and the scar which all the art of the best surgeons never succeeded in removing, drew down upon him the annoying and almost insulting nick-name of “scarred face.” It may be readily understood how from this time forward, soured by the consciousness of his partial disfigurement, as the ancient bard Byron had formerly been for a nearly similar reason, he avoided appearing in public, and thereby giving the crowd an opportunity of pointing the finger of scorn at the visible traces of his former attack of madness. He was never seen again till the day when, his vessel being hemmed in by the icebergs of the Gulf Stream, he was obliged with his companions to finish the crossing on foot over the solidly frozen Atlantic.
In the middle of the central state shelter, a huge vaulted hall with walls ten yards thick, without windows, surrounded with a hundred gigantic furnaces, and perpetually lit up by their hundred flaming maws, Miltiades one day appeared. The remnant of the flower of humanity, of both sexes, splendid even in its misery, was huddled together there. They did not consist of the great men of science with their bald pates, nor even the great actresses, nor the great writers, whose inspiration had deserted them, nor the consequential ones now past their prime, nor of prim old ladies—bronchopneumonia, alas! had made a clean sweep of them all at the very first frost—but the enthusiastic heirs of their traditions, their secrets, and also of their vacant chairs, that is to say, their pupils, full of talent and promise. Not a single university professor was there, but a crowd of deputies and assistants; not a single minister, but a crowd of young secretaries of state. Not a single mother of a family, but a bevy of artists’ models, admirably formed, and inured against the cold by the practice of posing for the nude; above all, a number of fashionable beauties, who had been likewise saved by the excellent hygienic effect of daily wearing low dresses, without taking into account the warmth of their temperament. Among them it was impossible not to notice the Princess Lydia, owing to her tall and exquisite figure, the brilliancy of her dress and her wit, of her dark eyes and fair complexion, owing in fact to the radiance of her whole person. She had carried off the prize at the last grand international beauty competition, and was accounted the reigning beauty of the drawing-rooms of Babylon. What a different set of individuals from that which the spectator formerly surveyed through his opera-glass from the top of the galleries of the so-called Chamber of Deputies! Youth, beauty, genius, love, infinite treasures of science and art, writers whose pens were of pure gold, artists with marvellous technique, singers one raved about, all that was left of refinement and culture on the earth, was concentrated in this last knot of human beings, which blossomed under the snow like a tuft of rhododendrons, or of Alpine roses at the foot of some mountain summit. But what dejection had fallen on these fair flowers! How sadly drooped these manifold graces!
At the sudden apparition of Miltiades every brow was lifted, every eye was fastened upon him. He was tall, lean, and wizened, in spite of the false plumpness of his thick white furs. When he threw back his big white hood, which recalled the Dominican cowl of antiquity, they caught sight of his huge scar athwart the icicles on his beard and eyebrows. At the sight of it first a smile and then a shudder, which was not due to cold alone, ran through the ranks of the women. For must we confess it, in spite of the efforts of a rational education, the inclination to applaud bravery and its indications could not be entirely uprooted from their hearts. Lydia, notably, remained imbued with this sentiment of another age, by a kind of moral ancestral reversion which served as a pendant to her physical atavism. She concealed so little her feelings of admiration, that Miltiades himself was struck by it. Her admiration was combined with astonishment, for he was believed to have been dead for years. They asked one another by what accumulation of miracles he had been able to escape the fate of his companions. He requested leave to speak. It was granted him. He mounted a platform, and such a profound silence ensued, one might have heard the snow falling outside, in spite of the thickness of the walls. But let us at this point allow an eye-witness to speak; let us copy an extract of the account that he phonographed of this memorable scene. I pass over the part of Miltiades’ discourse in which he related the thrilling story of the dangers he had encountered from the time he left his vessel. (Continuous applause.) After stating that in passing by Paris on a sledge drawn by reindeer—thanks to it being the season of the dog-days—he had recognised the site of this buried city
by the double-pointed mound of snow which had formed over the spires of Notre-Dame—(excitement in the audience)—the speaker continued :—
“The situation is serious,” said he, “nothing like it has been seen since the geological epochs. Is it irretrievable? No! (Hear! hear!) Desperate diseases require desperate remedies. An idea, a glimmer of hope has flashed upon me, but it is so strange, I shall never dare to reveal it to you. (Speak! Speak!) No, I dare not, I shall never dare to formulate this project. You would believe me to be still insane. You desire it, you promise me to listen to the end to my absurd and extravagant project? (Yes! yes!) Even to give it a fair trial? (Yes! Yes!) Well! I will speak. (Silence!)
“The hour has come to ascertain to what extent it is true to say and to keep on repeating, as has been the practice for the last three centuries since the time of a certain Stephenson, that all our energy, all our strength, whether physical or moral, comes to us from the sun. ... (Numerous voices: ‘That is so’). The calculation has been made: in two years, three months, and six days, if there still remains a morsel of coal there will not remain a morsel of bread! (Prolonged sensation.) Therefore, if the source of all force, of all motion, and all life is in the sun, and in the sun alone, there is no ground for self-delusion: in two years, three months, and six days, the genius of man will be quenched, and through the gloomy heavens the corpse of mankind, like a Siberian mammoth, will roll for everlasting, incapable for ever of resurrection. (Excitement.)
But is that the case? No, it is not, it cannot be the case. With all the energy of my heart, which does not come from the sun—that energy which comes from the earth, from our mother earth buried there below, far, far away, for ever hidden from our eyes—I protest against this vain theory, and against so many articles of faith and religion which I have been obliged hitherto to endure in silence. (Slight murmurs from the centre.) The earth is the contemporary of the sun, and not its daughter; the earth was formerly a luminous star like the sun, only sooner extinct. It is only on the surface that the earth is devoid of movement, frozen and paralysed. Its bosom is ever warm and burning. It has only concentrated its fire within itself in order to preserve it better. (Signs of interest in the audience.) There lies a virgin force that is unexploited, a force superior to all that the sun has been able to generate for our industry by waterfalls which to-day are frozen, by cyclones which now have ceased, by tides which to-day are suspended; a force in which our engineers, with a little initiative, will find a hundredfold the equivalent of the motive power they have lost. It is no more by this gesture (the speaker raises his finger to heaven), that the hope of salvation should henceforth be expressed, it is by this one. (He lowers his right hand towards the earth. ... Signs of astonishment: a few murmurs of dissent which are immediately repressed by the women.) We must say no more: ‘Up there!’ but, ‘below!’ There, below, far below, lies the promised Eden, the abode of deliverance and of bliss: there, and there alone, there are still innumerable conquests and discoveries to be made! (Bravos on the left.) Ought I to draw my conclusion? (Yes! yes!) Let us descend into these depths; let us make these abysses our sure retreat. The mystics had a sublime presentiment when they said in their Latin: ‘From the outward to the inward.’ The earth calls us to its inner self. For many centuries it has lived separated, so to say, from its children, the living creatures it produced outside during its period of fecundity before the cooling of its crust! After its crust cooled, the rays of a distant star alone, it is true, have maintained on this dead epidermis their artificial and superficial life which has been a stranger to her own.
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