I glanced up at the sun.  It shone with an extraordinary, dull clearness.  I saw it, now, as one who, until then, had seen it, only through a partially obscuring medium.  All about it, the sky had become black, with a clear, deep blackness, frightful in its nearness, and its unmeasured deep, and its utter unfriendliness.  For a great time, I looked into it, newly, and shaken and fearful.  It was so near.  Had I been a child, I might have expressed some of my sensation and distress, by saying that the sky had lost its roof.

Later, I turned, and peered about me, into the room.  Everywhere, it was covered with a thin shroud of the all-pervading white.  I could see it but dimly, by reason of the somber light that now lit the world.  It appeared to cling to the ruined walls; and the thick, soft dust of the years, that covered the floor knee-deep, was nowhere visible.  The snow must have blown in through the open framework of the windows.  Yet, in no place had it drifted; but lay everywhere about the great, old room, smooth and level.  Moreover, there had been no wind these many thousand years.  But there was the snow,[8] as I have told.

And all the earth was silent.  And there was a cold, such as no living man can ever have known.

The earth was now illuminated, by day, with a most doleful light, beyond my power to describe.  It seemed as though I looked at the great plain, through the medium of a bronze-tinted sea.

It was evident that the earth’s rotatory movement was departing, steadily.

The end came, all at once.  The night had been the longest yet; and when the dying sun showed, at last, above the world’s edge, I had grown so wearied of the dark, that I greeted it as a friend.  It rose steadily, until about twenty degrees above the horizon.  Then, it stopped suddenly, and, after a strange retrograde movement, hung motionless—­a great shield in the sky[9].  Only the circular rim of the sun showed bright—­only this, and one thin streak of light near the equator.

Gradually, even this thread of light died out; and now, all that was left of our great and glorious sun, was a vast dead disk, rimmed with a thin circle of bronze-red light.

XVIII

THE GREEN STAR

The world was held in a savage gloom—­cold and intolerable.  Outside, all was quiet—­quiet!  From the dark room behind me, came the occasional, soft thud[10] of falling matter—­fragments of rotting stone.  So time passed, and night grasped the world, wrapping it in wrappings of impenetrable blackness.

There was no night-sky, as we know it.  Even the few straggling stars had vanished, conclusively.  I might have been in a shuttered room, without a light; for all that I could see.  Only, in the impalpableness of gloom, opposite, burnt that vast, encircling hair of dull fire.  Beyond this, there was no ray in all the vastitude of night that surrounded me; save that, far in the North, that soft, mistlike glow still shone.