the silence of universal death—­a death in which we were so soon to join.  At the present instant that one frail sheet of glass, by holding in the extra oxygen which counteracted the poisoned ether, shut us off from the fate of all our kind.  For a few short hours the knowledge and foresight of one man could preserve our little oasis of life in the vast desert of death and save us from participation in the common catastrophe.  Then the gas would run low, we too should lie gasping upon that cherry-coloured boudoir carpet, and the fate of the human race and of all earthly life would be complete.  For a long time, in a mood which was too solemn for speech, we looked out at the tragic world.

“There is a house on fire,” said Challenger at last, pointing to a column of smoke which rose above the trees.  “There will, I expect, be many such—­possibly whole cities in flames—­when we consider how many folk may have dropped with lights in their hands.  The fact of combustion is in itself enough to show that the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere is normal and that it is the ether which is at fault.  Ah, there you see another blaze on the top of Crowborough Hill.  It is the golf clubhouse, or I am mistaken.  There is the church clock chiming the hour.  It would interest our philosophers to know that man-made mechanisms has survived the race who made it.”

“By George!” cried Lord John, rising excitedly from his chair.  “What’s that puff of smoke?  It’s a train.”

We heard the roar of it, and presently it came flying into sight, going at what seemed to me to be a prodigious speed.  Whence it had come, or how far, we had no means of knowing.  Only by some miracle of luck could it have gone any distance.  But now we were to see the terrific end of its career.  A train of coal trucks stood motionless upon the line.  We held our breath as the express roared along the same track.  The crash was horrible.  Engine and carriages piled themselves into a hill of splintered wood and twisted iron.  Red spurts of flame flickered up from the wreckage until it was all ablaze.  For half an hour we sat with hardly a word, stunned by the stupendous sight.

“Poor, poor people!” cried Mrs. Challenger at last, clinging with a whimper to her husband’s arm.

“My dear, the passengers on that train were no more animate than the coals into which they crashed or the carbon which they have now become,” said Challenger, stroking her hand soothingly.  “It was a train of the living when it left Victoria, but it was driven and freighted by the dead long before it reached its fate.”

“All over the world the same thing must be going on,” said I as a vision of strange happenings rose before me.  “Think of the ships at sea—­how they will steam on and on, until the furnaces die down or until they run full tilt upon some beach.  The sailing ships too—­how they will back and fill with their cargoes of dead sailors, while their timbers rot and their joints leak, till one by one they sink below the surface.  Perhaps a century hence the Atlantic may still be dotted with the old drifting derelicts.”