More days of terror passed. The red priest from the flaming hill and Minos the king from his lair on Mount Latmos watched the march of winter down the valley.
CHAPTER V
THE WARNING OF THE LAST MOON
When Nature issues a decree, the execution thereof is pitiless. She recks naught of dynasties or nations. When she would have a clean page on which to write, she erases, if needs be, and with inexorable completeness, the fairest characters she may have inscribed previously. The smallest and the greatest, the tiny grass blade, the towering forest giant, the lowly anthill, the lofty mountain, the blind worm in the dust, proud man, the "lord of creation"—be any or all of these in her path. Nature breaks them, and, with her ally, Time, makes smooth the page for her next writing.
Only those who are wise and instructed may pore over such an erasure and, from a faint trace here, a blur there, partly read and partly guess at that which once was writ.
Years uncounted, Sardanes had flourished in the wastes of the Southland. Then, the great All-Mother, always unhurried, drew a steadfast white finger across the valley.
Only a fortnight elapsed from the day on which the Gateway to the Future sent forth its first flare of fire, that followed centuries in which it had been dark—only a brief fortnight, and the Gateway alone of all the volcanic ring still sent fire and smoke heavenwards. All the sister hills lay silent and lifeless, their furious spirits spent and gone elsewhere, their seamed summits crowned with the white of Antarctic snows.
First to yield was the holy river Ukranis. Ice bound its sources until it became a mere streamlet, soon paralyzed by the cold into a glittering thread. A gray rime crept over the green velvet of the grass, and a white pall covered it softly. The blue roses withered and fell. The grain in the fields ceased to grow and lay lifeless. Bushes and shrubs died. The giant trees shed their faded foliage, their roots strangled in the chill of death, their palsied branches brittle and breaking down under a weight of snow. The bright birds of many hues that had flashed back and forth through the forest glades and lanes fluttered to the ground with mournful cries and died. The hum of insect life was stilled. On the hillsides, the little brown rabbits shivered in their burrows, nestled together and slept forever.
With all of these, there passed a hundred things, animate and inanimate, that had their living like in no other spot on the whole earth.