End of the world -- Fiction; Epidemics -- Fiction; Science fiction; Twenty-first century -- Fiction
become their prison, which appeared unable to resist the inroads of
ocean’s giant waves.
When we arrived at Dover, after a fatiguing day’s journey, we all
required rest and sleep; but the scene acting around us soon drove away
such ideas. We were drawn, along with the greater part of our
companions, to the edge of the cliff, there to listen to and make a
thousand conjectures. A fog narrowed our horizon to about a quarter of
a mile, and the misty veil, cold and dense, enveloped sky and sea in
equal obscurity. What added to our inquietude was the circumstance that
two-thirds of our original number were now waiting for us in Paris, and
clinging, as we now did most painfully, to any addition to our
melancholy remnant, this division, with the tameless impassable ocean
between, struck us with affright. At length, after loitering for
several hours on the cliff, we retired to Dover Castle, whose roof
sheltered all who breathed the English air, and sought the sleep
necessary to restore strength and courage to our worn frames and
languid spirits.
Early in the morning Adrian brought me the welcome intelligence that
the wind had changed: it had been south-west; it was now north-east.
The sky was stripped bare of clouds by the increasing gale, while the
tide at its ebb seceded entirely from the town. The change of wind
rather increased the fury of the sea, but it altered its late dusky hue
to a bright green; and in spite of its unmitigated clamour, its more
cheerful appearance instilled hope and pleasure. All day we watched the
ranging of the mountainous waves, and towards sunset a desire to
decypher the promise for the morrow at its setting, made us all gather
with one accord on the edge of the cliff. When the mighty luminary
approached within a few degrees of the tempest-tossed horizon,
suddenly, a wonder! three other suns, alike burning and brilliant,
rushed from various quarters of the heavens towards the great orb; they
whirled round it. The glare of light was intense to our dazzled eyes;
the sun itself seemed to join in the dance, while the sea burned like a
furnace, like all Vesuvius a-light, with flowing lava beneath. The
horses broke loose from their stalls in terror—a herd of cattle, panic
struck, raced down to the brink of the cliff, and blinded by light,
plunged down with frightful yells in the waves below. The time occupied
by the apparition of these meteors was comparatively short; suddenly
the three mock suns united in one, and plunged into the sea. A few
seconds afterwards, a deafening watery sound came up with awful peal
from the spot where they had disappeared.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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