Instead of the fair face of the world, as they had known it, bright with sunlight, green with the magnificent foliage of the forest, or the gentle verdure of the plain, they go forth upon a wasted, an unknown land, covered with oceans of mud and stones; the very face of the country changed—­lakes, rivers, hills, all swept away and lost.  They wander, breathing a foul and sickening atmosphere, under the shadow of an awful darkness, a darkness which knows no morning, no stars, no moon; a darkness palpable and visible, lighted only by electrical discharges from the abyss of clouds, with such roars of thunder as we, in this day of harmonious nature, can form no conception of.  It is, indeed, “chaos and ancient night.”  All the forces of nature are there, but disorderly, destructive, battling against each other, and multiplied a thousand-fold in power; the winds are cyclones, magnetism is gigantic, electricity is appalling.

The world is more desolate than the caves from which they have escaped.  The forests are gone; the fruit-trees are swept away; the beasts of the chase have perished; the domestic animals, gentle ministers to man, have disappeared; the cultivated fields are buried deep in drifts of mud and gravel; the people stagger in the darkness against each other; they fall into the chasms of the earth; within them are the two great oppressors of humanity, hunger and terror; hunger that knows not where to turn; fear that shrinks before the whirling blasts, the rolling thunder, the shocks of blinding lightning; that knows not what moment the heavens may again open and rain fire and stones and dust upon them.

God has withdrawn his face; his children are deserted; all the, kindly adjustments of generous Nature are gone.  God has left man in the midst of a material world without law; he is a wreck, a fragment, a lost particle,

{p. 228}

in the midst of an illimitable and endless warfare of giants.

Some lie down to die, hopeless, cursing their helpless gods; some die by their own bands; some gather around the fires of volcanoes for warmth and light—­stars that attract them from afar off; some feast on such decaying remnants of the great animals as they may find projecting above the débris, running to them, as we shall see, with outcries, and fighting over the fragments.

The references to the worship of “the morning star,” which occur in the legend, seem to relate to some great volcano in the East, which alone gave light when all the world was lost in darkness.  As Byron says, in his great poem, “Darkness”: 

     And they did live by watch-fires—­and the thrones,
     The palaces of crownèd kings—­the huts,
     The habitations of all things which dwell,
     Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
     And men were gathered round their blazing homes
     To look once more into each other’s face;
     Happy were they who dwelt within the eye
     Of the volcanoes and their mountain-torch.”