Page:Life in a thousand worlds.djvu/43

 I knew what my informant meant by "one and one-half wagon-wheel revolutions." This would be a period of about forty days and nights of earthly time. Do you wonder that my mind flew back to the forty days and nights of rain that destroyed, at one time! on our Earth, the whole human family, except the few who were saved in the ark?

"What are the evidences of this horrible world-ending?" I asked.

"They are on every hand. Have you not yet seen the vast craters, the mountains of barren cinder, the stumps of immense pillars, partly excavated? All this, and very much more, silently unfolds a tale of horror that can be faintly pictured only by the imagination. Think of a holocaust so terrible that one hundred million human creatures are thereby swept into death in the narrow compass of forty days! The records that have been brought down to us by the few survivors indicate the continual wails of horror rending the sky while the volcanic disturbances continued. Thousands and millions ran from place to place to find shelter from the storm of fire. At one place the surface would open