The man of science, who cancels flood by drought and drought by flood, laughs at all fiery threatenings and puts comet-fears with fairytales, now laughs no longer. Even he knows the world must die, and this is his chosen death. He plumps for the cold and the darkness.
Nor is he here in conflict with older prophets: some Hebrew ones—the day of the Lord, cried Amos, it is darkness and not light—and Norse ones, who foretold that Balder god of brightness must die in the end, when Fimbul-Winter will return again and forever. Nor in conflict with the heart’s own last vision of terror—Eternity: the Cold and the Darkness.
On this hypothesis, as on others, there may be cooperation for destruction. Cold may be bound up with or incidental to or helped out by some other agency.
Many, perhaps most, adherents of the No Water school, think we shall hardly get so far as to fail of direct drought. Water, which absorbs, retains and gives out again the heat the sun sendeth, in slowly disappearing from the atmosphere is rendering it slowly colder. No oxygen will save, when that fractional drop of water becomes more fractional; the world will become too cold to live in, as a result of its dryness, before it becomes too dry.
Our vanishing air—not only the vanishing water in it—secretly collaborates. It is going the way of the moon’s lost atmosphere; with it will go our best protection from the cold; without it we shall succumb. It will lessen as the sun’s heat lessens, just when we need it most.
The terrestrial movements contribute. Whereby we may die of cold in two separate stages: one hemisphere of earlier palsy, the other of final frost. Earth’s two different forms of rotation proceeding at different speeds, partition strains result; the strains become tides; the tides act as brakes. Forspent, the world slows down; halts, wearily creeps to paralysis. At last the two rotations will coincide. In that hour, there will be no seasons more: one hemisphere will be turned forever to the night; the other, warmer awhile, all the year and for all the years to the sun—till he too, the prime destroyer, shall go out and, all other deaths avoided, achieve man’s total end.
What is the Sun?
Hor, Sol, Ra; Sūrya Mitra, Savitr; Helios, Phaethon, Phoebus Apollo—he has had many names; many temples from Persia to Mexico, from Stonehenge to Xauxa, from the high Quirinal in Rome, golden Rome—Urbs solaris imperialis—to golden Cuzco, gold within, gold without, Cosa Sagrada, la imperial ciudad. In every mythology he has been a deity, or at the lowest a mighty man—do the Andaman Islanders confirm their title as the lowest of peoples by accounting him a woman, and the wife of the moon at that? He has been worshipped since there were worshippers, adored since souls knew adoration. He is a god.
He is a star. A middle-aged star of middle size and, as social brilliance in the heavens is reckoned, of strictly middle-class station: no Betelgeuse for bulk, no Sirius for glory, Companion of Sirius for dwarf intensity of glory. His burning heart is enclosed within the photosphere, a layer of red-hot ocean of gas, deeper than Asia, lashed all around into waves and Everest-high jets of scarlet spray that from the earth would sprinkle the moon; the chromosphere, his cloak of helium and hydrogen; the corona of coronium; the light zodiacal. His heat in the centre runs to millions, at the surface to thousands of degrees. Better guide than the mercury is to feel him shining in his strength on a Sahara noon, an Aden teatime, and to reflect that he is sending us a two thousand millionth part of it, and sending it from over ninety million miles away.
He has had children. Under most theories of the world’s origin—nebular, tidal, planetesimal, collisional—he is our parent, ancestor, creator; by him we had life. Under all physical theories of the world’s present, by him we live.
Lucerna Mundi, lantern of the world, by him we see.
He maintains the seas, the lakes and the rivers. He keeps in gaseous state the air we must breathe, in liquid state the water we and all living things must absorb—so much whereof as we need he vapourizes and turns into clouds, which he drives the winds to distribute for us. He enables the plants to assimilate their food from the air, and so is the author of all fruits, flowers and trees; the wine we drink and the wood we burn are directly informed of him, the warmth they give us is indirectly his. His spots pulsate, and we pulsate in answer. Electricity, radioactivity and their thousand daughter inventions are his; and the force in our brains and in our bodies. In him we live and move and have our being. Without him we are not.
And he is dying.
Through all those asserted certainties—water, fire and the rest—we had come so far to none so absolute. It is a fact no closing of eyes, no denying of objective reality can avert, no mystical-mathematical four-dimensional universe of point-events and curved space-time can exclude, no magical non-dimensional universe of God’s Dream or the Devil’s can abolish; within the framework of every scheme and every schemelessness the same will happen, the sun will die—just as each one of us will die in his time, whatever the grand plan or no-plan of the terrible universe may be.
Optimism seeks to prolong his life a little. Declares him of low density, susceptible of much further compression, able for long ages yet to generate more heat than he radiates. Chemical processes reinforce the contractional one, radioactive processes the chemical: the transmutation of his store of radial elements is a process almost everlasting, ensuring him effluence of light almost stanchless. His positive and negative ions bombard each other, whose mutual annihilation secures their common eternity as heat. Millions of meteors rush hourly upon him, their high speed compensating for their lowly size
