Famine carried off those whom pestilence had spared. “Reforms were introduced into institutions, and great changes took place in habits and customs; but the country never recovered the loss of its capital, and never regained its former prosperity. Commerce and industry dwindled away. Civilisation abandoned those countries which for so long it had preferred to all others. They became insalubrious and sterile. The territories that had supported so many millions of men became nothing more than a desert. On the hill of Fort Saint-Michel wild horses cropped the coarse grass.” The diastole had been followed by a systole. Mankind after the European, as after the Roman, civilisation fell back into darkness. A catastrophe of centuries was occupied by the evening, the midnight, and the dawn. As once the barbarians walked with wonder along the deserted Roman roads or suddenly emerged from forest and plain to gaze astonished on the vast ruins of aqueducts and coliseums and once populous cities, so the new child peoples which survived the cosmic catastrophe contemplated the embankments, the crumbling bridges, the tattered, torn fragments of deserted towns which marked the memories of our dead race. The wheel of history slowly revolved through the centuries, and after a time once again the unending cyclic process was renewed and another “civilisation” erected which thought itself the last word of human progress. “Days flowed like water from the fountains, and the centuries passed like drops falling from the ends of stalactites. Hunters came to chase the bears upon the hills that covered the forgotten city. Shepherds fed their flocks upon them. Labourers turned up the soil with their ploughs. Gardeners cultivated their lettuces and grafted their pear trees. They were not rich, and they had no arts. The walls of their cabins were covered with old vines and roses. A goat-skin clothed their tanned limbs, while their wives dressed themselves with the wool that they themselves had spun. The goat-herds moulded little figures of men and animals out of clay, or sang songs about the young girl who follows her lover through woods or among the browsing goats; while the pine trees whisper together, and the water utters its murmuring sound. The master of the house grew angry with the beetles who devoured his figs. He planned snares to protect his fowls from the velvet-tailed fox, and he poured out wine for his neighbours, saying, ‘Drink! the flies have not spoilt my vintage; the vines were dry before they came.’