I
could not satisfy myself, whether it had disappeared, after my waking,
or before. If it had mouldered under me, surely, I should have been
waked by the collapse. Then I remembered that the thick dust, which
covered the floor, would have been sufficient to soften my fall; so that
it was quite possible, I had slept upon the dust for a million years
or more. As these thoughts wandered through my brain, I glanced again, casually,
to where the chair had stood. Then, for the first time, I noticed that
there were no marks, in the dust, of my footprints, between it and the
window. But then, ages of years had passed, since I had awaked--tens of
thousands of years! My look rested thoughtfully, again upon the place where once had stood
my chair. Suddenly, I passed from abstraction to intentness; for there,
in its standing place, I made out a long undulation, rounded off with
the heavy dust. Yet it was not so much hidden, but that I could tell
what had caused it. I knew--and shivered at the knowledge--that it was a
human body, ages-dead, lying there, beneath the place where I had slept. It was lying on its right side, its back turned toward me. I could make
out and trace each curve and outline, softened, and moulded, as it were,
in the black dust. In a vague sort of way, I tried to account for its
presence there. Slowly, I began to grow bewildered, as the thought came
to me that it lay just about where I must have fallen when the chair
collapsed. Gradually, an idea began to form itself within my brain; a thought that
shook my spirit. It seemed hideous and insupportable; yet it grew upon
me, steadily, until it became a conviction. The body under that coating,
that shroud of dust, was neither more nor less than my own dead shell. I
did not attempt to prove it. I knew it now, and wondered I had not known
it all along. I was a bodiless thing. Awhile, I stood, trying to adjust my thoughts to this new problem. In
time--how many thousands of years, I know not--I attained to some degree
of quietude--sufficient to enable me to pay attention to what was
transpiring around me. Now, I saw that the elongated mound had sunk, collapsed, level with the
rest of the spreading dust. And fresh atoms, impalpable, had settled
above that mixture of grave-powder, which the aeons had ground. A long
while, I stood, turned from the window. Gradually, I grew more
collected, while the world slipped across the centuries into the future. Presently, I began a survey of the room. Now, I saw that time was
beginning its destructive work, even on this strange old building. That
it had stood through all the years was, it seemed to me, proof that it
was something different from any other house. I do not think, somehow,
that I had thought of its decaying. Though, why, I could not have said. It was not until I had meditated upon the matter, for some considerable
time, that I fully realized that the extraordinary space of time through
which it had stood, was sufficient to have utterly pulverized the very
stones of which it was built, had they been taken from any earthly
quarry. Yes, it was undoubtedly mouldering now. All the plaster had gone
from the walls; even as the woodwork of the room had gone, many
ages before. While I stood, in contemplation, a piece of glass, from one of the
small, diamond-shaped panes, dropped, with a dull tap, amid the dust
upon the sill behind me, and crumbled into a little heap of powder. As I
turned from contemplating it, I saw light between a couple of the stones
that formed the outer wall. Evidently, the mortar was falling away....

After awhile, I turned once more to the window, and peered out. I
discovered, now, that the speed of time had become enormous. The lateral
quiver of the sun-stream, had grown so swift as to cause the dancing
semi-circle of flame to merge into, and disappear in, a sheet of fire
that covered half the Southern sky from East to West. From the sky, I glanced down to the gardens. They were just a blur of a
palish, dirty green. I had a feeling that they stood higher, than in the
old days; a feeling that they were nearer my window, as though they had
risen, bodily. Yet, they were still a long way below me; for the rock,
over the mouth of the pit, on which this house stands, arches up to a
great height. It was later, that I noticed a change in the constant color of the
gardens. The pale, dirty green was growing ever paler and paler, toward
white. At last, after a great space, they became greyish-white, and
stayed thus for a very long time. Finally, however, the greyness began
to fade, even as had the green, into a dead white. And this remained,
constant and unchanged. And by this I knew that, at last, snow lay upon
all the Northern world. And so, by millions of years, time winged onward through eternity, to
the end--the end, of which, in the old-earth days, I had thought
remotely, and in hazily speculative fashion. And now, it was approaching
in a manner of which none had ever dreamed. I recollect that, about this time, I began to have a lively, though
morbid, curiosity, as to what would happen when the end came--but I
seemed strangely without imaginings. All this while, the steady process of decay was continuing. The few
remaining pieces of glass, had long ago vanished; and, every now and
then, a soft thud, and a little cloud of rising dust, would tell of some
fragment of fallen mortar or stone. I looked up again, to the fiery sheet that quaked in the heavens above
me and far down into the Southern sky. As I looked, the impression was
borne in upon me, that it had lost some of its first brilliancy--that it
was duller, deeper hued. I glanced down, once more, to the blurred white of the worldscape. Sometimes, my look returned to the burning sheet of dulling flame, that
was, and yet hid, the sun. At times, I glanced behind me, into the
growing dusk of the great, silent room, with its aeon-carpet of
sleeping dust.... So, I watched through the fleeting ages, lost in soul-wearing thoughts
and wonderings, and possessed with a new weariness. _XVII_

THE SLOWING ROTATION

It might have been a million years later, that I perceived, beyond
possibility of doubt, that the fiery sheet that lit the world, was
indeed darkening. Another vast space went by, and the whole enormous flame had sunk to a
deep, copper color. Gradually, it darkened, from copper to copper-red,
and from this, at times, to a deep, heavy, purplish tint, with, in it, a
strange loom of blood. Although the light was decreasing, I could perceive no diminishment in
the apparent speed of the sun. It still spread itself in that dazzling
veil of speed. The world, so much of it as I could see, had assumed a dreadful shade
of gloom, as though, in very deed, the last day of the worlds
approached. The sun was dying; of that there could be little doubt; and still the
earth whirled onward, through space and all the aeons. At this time, I
remember, an extraordinary sense of bewilderment took me.