"Not hard to say," replied the stranger. "Every hundred years a little blue bird passes by, flying between them and the globe, and as it passes it touches the stone with the tip of its wing. On the last day of the hundredth year the people gather and watch with eager eyes all day for the passing of the bird, and while they watch they do not suffer. Now this is the last hour of the last day of the hundredth year, and you see how they gaze."
"But why do they watch to see the bird?"
"Each time the bird passes it touches the stone, and every hundred years it will thus touch it, till the stone be utterly worn away."
"Ten thousand ages, and yet again ten thousand, and it will not have been worn away," said Rheinfrid. "But when it has been worn away, what then?"
"Why, then," said the stranger, "Eternity will be no nearer to its end than it is now. But see! see!"
Rheinfrid looked, and beheld a little blue bird flash across the huge ball of glimmering adamant, brush it with the tip of a single feather, and dart onward.
And down in the crater all the faces were turned away again, and the crowd fell into such confusion as an autumn gale makes among the fallen leaves in a spinney; and out of the innermost pit the smoke and steam rose in clouds, till only the jagged ridges were visible; and a long cry of a myriad voices deadened by the deep distance rose like the terrible ghost of a cry from the abyss.
And this was one of the Seven Cries of the World.
For the Seven Cries of the World are these: the Cry of the Blood of Abel, and the Cry of the Deluge of Waters, and the Cry for the First-born of Egypt, and the Cry of the Cities of the Plain, and the Cry of Rachel in Ramah, and the Cry in the darkness of the ninth hour, and, more grievous than any of these, the Cry of the Doom of the Pit.
"Truly," said Rheinfrid, shivering, "one day is as a thousand years in the sight of the Lord."