Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

108 THE COMET

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 secur rying to mountain-caves for refuge, have a new terror: the er y 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 sulmatine and rushing of the dines, 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 lb mighty rocks, they perish by the million ; a few only reach the shelter of the caverns; and hence: glaring backward, look out over the ruins of a Bertroyed world.

And not humanity alone has fled to these hidingplaces : 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,