“When I sent you my last message I was at the Tower of Observation.  As the last wave was emitted from the transmitter, the hand of Superintendent Alca, whom I met at the mines, was laid upon my shoulder.  I looked up in surprise.  He answered my questioning glance:  ’I did not return with Chapman.  There was no need of it.  A barge going to the City of Light took the body.  I explained everything in a letter to the Council.  I was distressed over the news I had received of the approach of the cometary mass, which I have detected myself, and I hurried after you in my own kil-chow (the name of the little porcelain steamers), anxious to see this terrible thing.  Let us go out and watch the wonder.  Whatever happens we shall remain together.  I am from Scandor myself, and though I might have been safer at the mines, I could not stay there in the crisis.’

“We descended to the ground and walked out over the hillside.  The encircling range of high country about Scandor is, perhaps, one thousand feet high.  Its crest is a low swell, that beyond the city falls away in broken, irregular slopes to the country of the Ribi on one side, and to far outstretched plains on almost every other side.  This dome was covered with the people of Scandor, fleeing from the doomed city.  The long lines of moving figures were issuing from the city through its numerous boulevards, and crowding the spaces on the hilltops.  The astronomers knew exactly now the nature of the approaching mass, its orbit, spacial extent and weight.  Their proclamation had been prepared and pasted all over the city, announcing its certain destruction, but that the area of devastation would only embrace the city, that the cometary visitor was a narrow train or procession of meteors of stone and iron, that the force of impact would be considerable, enough to crush to the ground the glassy splendor of the beautiful city, and that beyond its limits there would be almost no falls.

“Beautiful, indeed, was Scandor in the morning light.  It lay before us shining with a hundred hues.  How can I tell you of its exquisite perfection!  Its arrangement expressed a color scheme simple and effective.  The amphitheatre rose in the center, an opalescent yellow; the boulevards spaced with trees, stretched out in radiating lines from it, defined by the blue lines of ornamental metal pillars which held the lamps; from point to point, piercing the air from the shady peaks or squares shot up also the needles of metal holding the curious electric globes, while at regular intervals blue domes like gigantic azure bubbles interrupted the streets of square and colonnaded houses, that began around the amphitheatre, with pale saffron tones, and grew in intensity until the edges of the huge populous ellipse were laid like a deep orange rim upon the green country side.  The light falling upon this reflected, refracted and dispersed, seemed to convert it into a liquid and faintly throbbing lake of color, cut up into segments by the dark lanes or streets of trees.