To gratify my longing desire for information on this most important subject, the Spirit proceeded to inform me that their histories recorded a large number of these successive catastrophes, and that they were succeeded by a new and more terrible one, which he was proceeding to explain, when I interrupted him by asking for an approximate estimate of their number. Aware of my anxious desire for numerical accuracy, he said he could, in this one instance, gratify it fully. “If there is,” said my informant, “any one point better established than all others, it is that there had occurred exactly one hundred and twenty-one of these avatars of destruction.”
I now felt as if I had discovered one solitary fixed point in the vast chaos of time. My guide described to me that, after the termination of this system of one hundred and twenty-one cycles, a new and more terrific system of events followed each other.
First, however, he said he must mention an interregnum, irregular in its progress, but still of vast duration; {411} in fact, some of his race had been able to prove that it occupied at least three times as long as any one of those just described.
〈VARIOUS SHAKES AND SMASHES.〉
(e.) It commenced by a motion very like that to which space itself had been submitted at the end of each avatar, finishing with a smash, and followed by a period of repose of about ten thousand years. It however differed from those avatars inasmuch as there was no inversion of the position of cellar and attic.
(f.) A new form of shaking of universal solid space now arose, much more frequent but less destructive than the former. It occurred about once in two years, and was repeated many hundred thousand times.
(g.) Again a period exactly similar to that recorded in (e) occurred.
(h.) This was followed by a long series of movements of all solidity, approaching, as far as I could understand it, to an oscillating or wave motion. This continued without intermission during exactly three of those cycles whose precise number had been preserved.
(i.) During the whole of this period there was a great destruction of the race. A universal sickness arose and continued more or less, so that multitudes actually perished, and those who escaped could scarcely carry on the ordinary calculations necessary for their existence.
(j.) Another period followed, ending with a smash excessively like (e).