It was necessary at any cost to capture these solar rays and to prevent their radiation into space. It was easy to store up this heat in large quantities, for the Sun shone unobscured by any cloud and the day was long—fifty-five hours.
For a long time the efforts of architects had been solely directed towards this imprisonment of the Sun’s rays and the prevention of their dispersion during the fifty-five hours of the night. They had succeeded in accomplishing this by an ingenious arrangement of glass roofs, superposed one upon the other, and by movable screens. All combustible material had long before been exhausted; and even the hydrogen extracted from water was difficult to obtain.
The mean temperature in the open air during the daytime was not very low, not falling below −10°.6 Notwithstanding the changes which the ages had wrought in vegetable life, no species of plants could exist, even in this equatorial zone.
As for the other latitudes, they had been totally uninhabitable for thousands of years, in spite of every effort made to live in them. In the latitudes of Paris, Nice, Rome, Naples, Algiers and Tunis, all protective atmospheric action had ceased, and the oblique rays of the sun had proved insufficient to warm the soil which was frozen to a great depth, like a veritable block of ice. The world’s population had gradually diminished from ten milliards to nine, to eight, and then to seven, one-half the surface of the globe being then habitable. As the habitable zone became more and more restricted to the equator, the population had still further diminished, as had also the mean length of human life, and the day came when only a few hundred millions remained, scattered in groups along the equator, and maintaining life only by the artifices of a laborious and scientific industry.
Later still, toward the end, only two groups of a few hundred human beings were left, occupying the last surviving centers of industry. From all the rest of the globe the human race had slowly but inexorably disappeared—dried up, exhausted, degenerated, from century to century, through the lack of an assimilable atmosphere and sufficient food. Its last remnants seemed to have lapsed back into barbarism, vegetating like the Eskimo of the north. These two ancient centers of civilization, themselves yielding to decay, had survived only at the cost of a constant struggle between industrial genius and implacable nature.
Even here, between the tropics and the equator, the two remaining groups of human beings which still contrived to exist in face of a thousand hardships which yearly became more insupportable, did so only by subsisting, so to speak, on what their predecessors had left behind. These two ocean valleys, one of which was near the bottom of what is now the Pacific ocean, the other to the south of the present island of Ceylon, had formerly been the sites of two immense cities of glass—iron and glass having been, for a long time, the materials chiefly employed in building construction. They resembled vast winter-gardens, without upper stories, with transparent ceilings of immense height. Here were to be found the last plants, except those cultivated in the subterranean galleries leading to rivers flowing under ground.
Elsewhere the surface of the Earth was a ruin, and even here only the last vestiges of a vanished greatness were to be seen.
In the first of these ancient cities of glass, the sole survivors were two old men, and the grandson of one of them, Omegar, who had seen his mother and sisters die, one after the other, of consumption, and who now wandered in despair through these vast solitudes. Of these old men, one had formerly been a philosopher and had consecrated his long life to the study of the history of perishing humanity; the other was a physician who had in vain sought to save from consumption the last inhabitants of the world. Their bodies seemed wasted by anaemia rather than by age. They were pale as specters, with long, white beards, and only their moral energy sustained them yet an instant against the decree of destiny. But they could not struggle longer against this destiny, and one day Omegar found them stretched lifeless, side by side. From the dying hands of one fell the last history ever written, the history of the final transformations of humanity, written half a century before. The second had died in his laboratory while endeavoring to keep in order the nourishment tubes, automatically regulated by machinery propelled by solar engines.
The last servants, long before developed by education from the simian race, had succumbed many years before, as had also the great majority of the animal species domesticated for the service of humanity. Horses, dogs, reindeers, and certain large birds used in aerial service, yet survived, but so entirely changed that they bore no resemblance to their progenitors.
It was evident that the race was irrevocably doomed. Science had disappeared with scientists, art with artists, and the survivors lived only upon the past. The heart knew no more hope, the spirit no ambition. The light was in the past; the future was an eternal night. All was over. The glories of days gone by had forever vanished. If, in preceding centuries, some traveller, wandering in these solitudes, thought he had rediscovered the sites of Paris, Rome, or the brilliant capitals which had succeeded them, he was the victim of his own imagination; for these sites had not existed for millions of years, having been swept away by the waters of the sea. Vague traditions had floated down through the ages, thanks to the printing-press and the recorders of the great events of history; but even these traditions were uncertain and often false. For, as to Paris, the annals of history contained only some references to a maritime Paris; of its existence as the capital of France for thousands of years, there was no trace nor memory. The
