And then came a wonder.  It seemed to those who in Europe watched for the rising of the star that the world must have ceased its rotation.  In a thousand open spaces of down and upland the people who had fled thither from the floods and the falling houses and sliding slopes of hill watched for that rising in vain.  Hour followed hour through a terrible suspense, and the star rose not.  Once again men set their eyes upon the old constellations they had counted lost to them forever.  In England it was hot and clear overhead, though the ground quivered perpetually, but in the tropics, Sirius and Capella and Aldebaran showed through a veil of steam.  And when at last the great star rose near ten hours late, the sun rose close upon it, and in the centre of its white heart was a disc of black.

Over Asia it was the star had begun to fall behind the movement of the sky, and then suddenly, as it hung over India, its light had been veiled.  All the plain of India from the mouth of the Indus to the mouths of the Ganges was a shallow waste of shining water that night, out of which rose temples and palaces, mounds and hills, black with people.  Every minaret was a clustering mass of people, who fell one by one into the turbid waters, as heat and terror overcame them.  The whole land seemed a-wailing and suddenly there swept a shadow across that furnace of despair, and a breath of cold wind, and a gathering of clouds, out of the cooling air.  Men looking up, near blinded, at the star, saw that a black disc was creeping across the light.  It was the moon, coming between the star and the earth.  And even as men cried to God at this respite, out of the East with a strange inexplicable swiftness sprang the sun.  And then star, sun and moon rushed together across the heavens.

So it was that presently, to the European watchers, star and sun rose close upon each other, drove headlong for a space and then slower, and at last came to rest, star and sun merged into one glare of flame at the zenith of the sky.  The moon no longer eclipsed the star but was lost to sight in the brilliance of the sky.  And though those who were still alive regarded it for the most part with that dull stupidity that hunger, fatigue, heat and despair engender, there were still men who could perceive the meaning of these signs.  Star and earth had been at their nearest, had swung about one another, and the star had passed.  Already it was receding, swifter and swifter, in the last stage of its headlong journey downward into the sun.

And then the clouds gathered, blotting out the vision of the sky, the thunder and lightning wove a garment round the world; all over the earth was such a downpour of rain as men had never before seen, and where the volcanoes flared red against the cloud canopy there descended torrents of mud.  Everywhere the waters were pouring off the land, leaving mud-silted ruins, and the earth littered like a storm-worn beach with all that had floated, and the dead bodies of the men and brutes, its children.  For days the water streamed off the land, sweeping away soil and trees and houses in the way, and piling huge dykes and scooping out Titanic gullies over the country side.  Those were the days of darkness that followed the star and the heat.  All through them, and for many weeks and months, the earthquakes continued.