The star—our own Sun—and the nine planets we have just mentioned were invisible in our sense of the word. They only emitted dark rays, black light. For a long time already, in fact, the Sun had been extinct, and the humanities who had lived on the surface of the Earth, of Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, of the trans-Neptunian planet and its sisters, had died in turn and had been gradually erased from the great book of universal life.
But by means of the superior methods of investigation which this Andromedic astronomer had at his disposal, he succeeded, after a laborious study which it took him 250 years of continuous work to complete, in reconstructing the history of the terrestrial globe, which interested him specially, and in discovering that it had been formerly inhabited by animals of different species, and in particular by certain bipeds endowed with relative intelligence.
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This obscure globe, a black bullet revolving round another black bullet, had a whole history of its own. It had contained in former times an intense and luxuriant life. The springs and summers had brought forth a profusion of flowers and fruit in the sunlit fields, the land had unfolded its golden carpet of corn, springs had murmured among the hills, birds had sung in the trees, the perfumed breezes of meadows and woods had been wafted through the valleys, rivers had rolled through the vast plains, villages and towns had grown up along their banks, human communities had gradually peopled the world, inventing fruitful industries, delightful arts, brilliant sciences; prodigious cities had, in different ages, raised palaces for kings and temples for gods; Memphis had succeeded Babylon, Athens had followed Memphis, Rome had cast Athens into oblivion, Paris had eclipsed Rome, and had vanished in its turn; hundreds of millions of brains had thought, hundreds of millions of hearts had beaten, eternal loves had been sworn, divine embraces had united loving souls, innocent children, charged by the light of day, had held out their arms for the kisses of their mothers, and life in all its forms had sparkled for millions of years in sheaves of light ever renewed like universal and inextinguishable fireworks. Struggles, miseries, lies, rivalries, ambitions, battles, despairs, tears, mournings, had too often disfigured with black tempests the sky whose clearness had, in the springtime of life, seemed unchangeable.
What had dominated everything was a wise and impenetrable trickery by which Nature persuaded all young girls to become women, to adorn themselves with irresistible allurements, and to open their arms to men in order to assure the continuity of life, hiding from their truthful eyes the dangers and sufferings to which she condemns them by surrounding them with flowers. And thus humanity had continued without a stop, believing that its destiny was to enjoy without end and progress without a limit; and thus it had finally reached the annihilation of the race and the planet, without leaving anything behind of its splendours and its conquests. What is past is past. Neither terrestrial humanity nor its abode remained. All had disappeared, all had been suppressed, except the spirit. The universal spirit still reigned. But the metamorphoses of matter had transformed everything. The entire history of our globe had been wiped off the slate by the sponge of Time; and the sidereal universe went on as if that history had never been written.
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For several millions of centuries, the Sun had been a globe of gas, shedding light and heat around it. After being a brilliant white it had become yellow and then red, passing, in the course of its cooling process, through the successive stages of white, yellow, orange, and red suns like Sirius, Arcturus, Betelgeuse, and Antares. As it had grown cooler, terrestrial life had become attenuated. The Sun had finally been covered with a solid crust, often pierced by the pressure of the incandescent lava within, and giving rise to prodigious volcanoes. With the failure of light and heat, the joys and pains of terrestrial life had come to an end. And the radiant day-star of former days had become an obscure globe covered with oceans and clouds, without a new sun to illuminate it, without day or twilight, careering through space in the eternal night, and gradually enveloped in a winding sheet of ice and snow consisting of carbonic acid. All the nations of the Earth had gone to rest in as many cemeteries. The dying Sun had recapitulated in its evolution the phases of its ancestors. In infinite space, the extinct suns are much more numerous than the luminous suns, and the stars revived by collision with another are the exception. Temporary stars, which only shine a short time, are exceptional occurrences.
Thus our extinct Sun still roamed through the void, carrying along its retinue of defunct planets and travelling with great speed through empty and unconcerned space.
And at the time of which we are speaking, the stars still shone in the sky, the worlds still gravitated around the suns in space; but they were no longer the same stars, nor the same suns, planets, or humanities; it was neither the Earth nor its contemporaries. Life continued to blossom; but it was not our life.
Just as, before the birth of the Earth, other worlds had flourished in space, so also after the death of our planet will the universe continue to exist, as it existed during the human era. And in the world of which we speak, a new and flourishing humanity shone in the joy of another sun. What had happened was in direct opposition to what terrestrial theologians had taught us concerning the end of the world. For them the end of the world was to have meant the end of the living universe and the establishment of a celestial and infernal world. For every one of the mortals inhabiting the future globe of which we speak, life passed with the fugitive and inexorable speed of the river which flows from its source to the sea, day by day, month by month, year by year, so swiftly that at the end of its course all the moments of that life seem to touch.