The art and science and culture of five hundred years had been forgotten in those few weeks of madness, and mankind had sunk back wholesale into the grossest superstitions of the Dark Ages. Every night, when the flaming shape of the Fire-Cloud blazed out among the stars, millions fell down on their knees and greeted it with prayers and invocations, as savages had once been wont to worship their fetishes. By the end of August, when the fiery arc overarched more than two-thirds of the heavens and rivalled the sunlight itself in brightness, the degeneration of humanity had advanced to such a fearful stage of intellectual and moral depravity, that even human sacrifices were offered to appease the wrath of the deity who was believed to have taken the shape of the Fire-Cloud. Under the influence of delirium the human mind had gone back through twenty-five centuries, and the worship of Baal and Moloch had returned upon earth. Only a small minority of men and women preserved their senses amidst the universal madness. These greeted the Aerians as friends, and heard their message, and promised to remain steadfast to the end, but as day after day went by and the terror grew and the nations plunged deeper and deeper into the saturnalia of frenzy and despair, the task undertaken by Alan and Alma grew more and more hopeless, and when the last day of August came, they at length confessed to themselves that it was useless to pursue it any further. This, too, was the day on which the term of absence granted by the Council expired, and so at nightfall, after having carried their message round the whole world and passed it, by the mouths of those who were willing to listen, through many lands, they at length reluctantly turned their prows homeward, and, with hearts sickened by all the unspeakable horrors they had witnessed, soared upward into the luridly-lighted heavens, leaving the world to the fate which in twenty-three days more would overwhelm the conquerors and the conquered, the few sane and the many mad, in universal and inevitable destruction. Alan timed his arrival so that the _Alma_ and her consort crossed the Ridge a few minutes after sunrise on the 1st of September. As they alighted in the central square of the city and disembarked to greet the group of friends and kindred who were waiting to receive them, a strange stillness struck their ears and sent a mysterious chill to their hearts.