“Which shall win?”
“Ah, my friend, we are young, but we know which will win. It is a sad thought that, in time to come, the snow of the south and the north, and the ice will extend and extend until they meet, blotting out all life in their marvellous circular tract, until the most minute forms thereof do vanish and perish.”
“And then?”
“Seas dry, globe cooled to its centre, the snow, the moisture, and ice itself extinct, the fires of even the interior gone for ever. Cracked and crevassed, we shall roll, a dead planet, round the sun, a moon to it, perhaps, until this world burst into pieces and fall upon other planets in cosmic dust.”
Ingomar was silent, and looked somewhat sad. He knew his friend was clever, and a student of nature in its widest sense, but he hardly expected to find in him a philosophic pessimist.
“And then?” said Ingomar, almost sadly. “And then, my friend?”
Curtis’s face sparkled with happiness and enthusiasm almost instantly.
“And then, Ingomar? Away with thoughts of gloom, millions and billions of years of sleep are but as our puny seven hours, and the same God, the Good, the Eternal, Who awoke us at first, can and will awake us again to the brightness of another day.
“Look around you,” he said, with outstretched arm. “Look at the beauty before and beneath us.”
There were tears in the young fellow’s eyes.