Are there any words that can draw, even faintly, such a picture—­its terror, its immensity, its horrors, its destructiveness, its surpassal of all earthly experience and imagination?  And this human ant-hill, the world, how insignificant would it be in the grasp of such a catastrophe!  Its laws, its temples, its libraries, its religions, its armies, its mighty nations, would be but as the veriest

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stubble—­dried grass, leaves, rubbish-crushed, smashed, buried, under this heaven-rain of horrors.

But, lo! through the darkness, the wretches not beaten down and whelmed in the débris, but scurrying to mountain-caves for refuge, have a new terror:  the cry passes from lip to lip, “The world is on fire!”

The head of the comet sheds down fire.  Its gases have fallen in great volumes on the earth; they ignite; amid the whirling and rushing of the débris, caught in cyclones, rises the glare of a Titanic conflagration.  The winds beat the rocks against the rocks; they pick up sand-heaps, peat-beds, and bowlders, and whirl them madly in the air.  The heat increases.  The rivers, the lakes, the ocean itself, evaporate.

And poor humanity!  Burned, bruised, wild, crazed, stumbling, blown about like feathers in the hurricanes, smitten by mighty rocks, they perish by the million; a few only reach the shelter of the caverns; and thence, glaring backward, look out over the ruins of a destroyed world.

And not humanity alone has fled to these hiding-places:  the terrified denizens of the forest, the domestic animals of the fields, with the instinct which in great tempests has driven them into the houses of men, follow the refugees into the caverns.  We shall see all this depicted in the legends.

The first effect of the great heat is the vaporization of the waters of the earth; but this is arrested long before it has completed its work.

Still the heat is intense—­how long it lasts, who shall tell?  An Arabian legend indicates years.

The stones having ceased to fall, the few who have escaped—­and they are few indeed, for many are shut up for ever by the clay-dust and gravel in their hiding-places,

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and on many others the convulsions of the earth have shaken down the rocky roofs of the caves—­the few survivors come out, or dig their way out, to look upon a changed and blasted world.  No cloud is in the sky, no rivers or lakes are on the earth; only the deep springs of the caverns are left; the sun, a ball of fire, glares in the bronze heavens.  It is to this period that the Norse legend of Mimer’s well, where Odin gave an eye for a drink of water, refers.