“I wish it were well over with us,” said the lady wistfully.  “Oh, George, I am so frightened.”

“You’ll be the bravest of us all, little lady, when the time comes.  I’ve been a blusterous old husband to you, dear, but you’ll just bear in mind that G. E. C. is as he was made and couldn’t help himself.  After all, you wouldn’t have had anyone else?”

“No one in the whole wide world, dear,” said she, and put her arms round his bull neck.  We three walked to the window and stood amazed at the sight which met our eyes.

Darkness had fallen and the dead world was shrouded in gloom.  But right across the southern horizon was one long vivid scarlet streak, waxing and waning in vivid pulses of life, leaping suddenly to a crimson zenith and then dying down to a glowing line of fire.

“Lewes is ablaze!”

“No, it is Brighton which is burning,” said Challenger, stepping across to join us.  “You can see the curved back of the downs against the glow.  That fire is miles on the farther side of it.  The whole town must be alight.”

There were several red glares at different points, and the pile of debris upon the railway line was still smoldering darkly, but they all seemed mere pin-points of light compared to that monstrous conflagration throbbing beyond the hills.  What copy it would have made for the Gazette!  Had ever a journalist such an opening and so little chance of using it—­the scoop of scoops, and no one to appreciate it?  And then, suddenly, the old instinct of recording came over me.  If these men of science could be so true to their life’s work to the very end, why should not I, in my humble way, be as constant?  No human eye might ever rest upon what I had done.  But the long night had to be passed somehow, and for me at least, sleep seemed to be out of the question.  My notes would help to pass the weary hours and to occupy my thoughts.  Thus it is that now I have before me the notebook with its scribbled pages, written confusedly upon my knee in the dim, waning light of our one electric torch.  Had I the literary touch, they might have been worthy of the occasion, As it is, they may still serve to bring to other minds the long-drawn emotions and tremors of that awful night.

Chapter IV

A DIARY OF THE DYING

How strange the words look scribbled at the top of the empty page of my book!  How stranger still that it is I, Edward Malone, who have written them—­I who started only some twelve hours ago from my rooms in Streatham without one thought of the marvels which the day was to bring forth!  I look back at the chain of incidents, my interview with McArdle, Challenger’s first note of alarm in the Times, the absurd journey in the train, the pleasant luncheon, the catastrophe, and now it has come to this—­that we linger alone upon an empty planet, and so sure is our fate