Through deed of the earth’s own. …
Unhelped of the sun, not in solar mode but Stygian, Earth may find fire for self-destruction. The heat is there. We are still a gaseous globe, with a solid crust much thinner in proportion than eggshell to egg. The heat is there. Every fifty feet you go down the thermometer goes one degree up; two miles or so inward it is the boiling point of water, and there, below the lowest granite, the lowest gabbro, red-hot, white-hot, incalescent, incandescent, not a morning’s walk beneath our feet, glows the ardent underworld. Which, any hour, may renew its ancient zeal. No need to explode, to send flying the whole crust. The old channels to the old outlets show an easier way: forth of a thousand reawakened volcanoes, from the lowliest to the highest, from Cosima to Cotopaxi or the Sahama, burning matter, tumults of lava molten and magmatic, will spout and spread, covering the earth already riven and afire from great earthquakes, and struck by purple lightning. In three millenaries seventeen million people have died plutonically; all the seventeen hundred million people on the earth today may so perish in three minutes.
In plutonic perishing to be included not only eruptions but earthquakes, not only burstings through the crust but the crust’s own fatal shiftings, not only vulcanism but seism. If the crust is cooling faster and contracting faster than the globe as a whole, then the shell will get too small for the egg, and will crack here, break there, split everywhere; as the moon they say once did, which her streamers of obsidian seem to argue. Tension is increasing, and the coming period of continent-wide cracks and breaks, ups and downs, loud interchanges of land and sea, will blot out, together with ourselves, our memories of those gentler seismic centuries from Pompei to Lisbon and Lisbon to San Francisco. Or if it is the earth that is getting smaller more quickly than her crust, then the crust is getting too big, and to adapt itself to the dwindling mass it encloses must further fold and crinkle, as though not already pulled and strained and faulted enough by the speed with which she turns (madly whirls) on her axis. Such adaptations also, such crinklings, will take the form of earthquakes more fearful than any in the past, and miserably destroy mankind.
Whether sun-helped or self-kindled, how bravely the earth will flare! Her garments of gladness are cinerable, incremable; her wood is all touchwood; her green tunic of verdure is wrought not of salamander’s wool, has no woof incombustible nor warp asbestine; every tree and every town shall be fuel, all people and all palaces for devouring, all life shall be food for the flames. Souls into slag and embers; burning instead of beauty.
There are gainsayers, who cap each pyromaniac might with fireproof won’t.
The sun won’t grow larger; he’s too old.
He won’t grow hotter; long ago he turned compression corner, and began spending more heat than he earns.
He won’t burst; having no crust to burst through.
He won’t divide; not having the special properties of the fissurable stars, will know no Great Schism.
With that line of force he cannot terrify us, torrify us; are we not already in a straight line, if straight lines there be, between him and every other star?
He may indeed drift into a nebula. That chance, unlike the others, is not fantastic; but it is small, and need not be fatal. We’ve been wandering through heaven this last few myriad years without such mishap.
Yet more hopeless of fulfilment are the non-solar prophecies of calorific end; firemongers come off even worse than with the sun.
The earth won’t explode. Her shell may be thin, but it’s strong—strong enough to have held its own against all the subterranean forces ever since they first permitted it to form.
Volcanoes are becoming extinct.
The seismic curve is downward.
Add and combine all their dire possibilities; together they touch not probability. Crueller gods than Vulcan lie in wait.
Yet, if burnt, think some, what matter? We shall live again. Earth is Phoenix.
Who had five hundred years of radiant life. Then, still splendid, his wings laden with spices, he flew from Hindustan to Heliopolis, entered the temple there; of sweet woods, frankincense and cassia, fuel-yew undeciduous, eternal, built him his own pyre on the altar, fanned with his own wings the flame, and was burned to ashes; wherein next day was born a new phoenix, feathered and fledged, who on the third day saluted the priest and flew away into India, for five hundred new years of radiant life.
Earth is Phoenix. Burned to ashes, she would live again, and, when the hour came round, through new fire of Easter Eve, lumen Christi, Paschal candle of destruction, again would die.
This is the Stoics’ theory. After its five hundred—five million million—years of life, the world is to end by violence of fire. An identical one will be born from the phoenical ashes, salute the sun, then set forth on its cycle of flight. And so forever: through an endless cycle of decalescence, recalescence, there being no one world—rather an infinite series of identical worlds, having lived an eternity of times, with an eternity of times to live.
Sometimes we seem to remember, and to foresee.
Water
Not fire but flood.
Less patron’d by the generations of old, this mode has in revenge had greater dominion over more modern expectation.
In first result, Comet and Fire might be watery ends. A comet could pull up the deeps, and flood before it poisoned or struck. Increased heat could drown ere it had time to scorch: at the first touch of the sun grown mightier the mountain snows would melt with terrible speed, would pour down in myriad converging streams from all high places into all low; from the Alps into the over-civilized European lowlands, into Italy, Germany, France; from the Himalayas into the over-peopled Ganges plains, torrenting from Everest to Comorin; from the African heights into the black jungles south and
