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 Esquimaux 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.
THE SOLE SURVIVORS.
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 anæmia 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 names which to us seem immortal, Confucius, Plato, Mahomet, Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon, had perished and were forgotten. Art had, indeed, preserved noble memories; but these memories did not extend as far back as the infancy of humanity, and reached only a few million years into the past. Omegar lingered in an ancient gallery of pictures, bequeathed by former centuries, and contemplated the great cities which had disappeared. Only one of these pictures related to what had once been Europe, and was a view of Paris, consisting of a promontory projecting into the sea, crowned by an astronomical temple and gay with helicopterons circling above the lofty towers of its terraces. Immense ships were plowing the sea. This classic Paris was the Paris of the one hundred and seventieth century of the Christian era, corresponding to the one hundred and fifty-seventh of the astronomical era—the Paris which existed immediately prior to the final submergence of the land. Even its name had changed; for words change like persons and things. Nearby, other pictures portrayed the great but less ancient cities which had risen in America, Australia, Asia, and afterwards upon the continents which had emerged from the ocean. And so this museum of the past recalled in succession the passing pomps of humanity down to the end.
“ALL DAY LONG HE WANDERED THROUGH THE VAST GALLERIES.”