Page:The evolution of worlds - Lowell.djvu/257

Rh same, in punctual obedience only to the slowly shifting year.

The next stage of deprivation is the parting with the day. Although the day disappears, the result is too much day or too little, depending on where you choose to consider yourself upon the afflicted orb. For tidal friction proceeds to lengthen the twenty-four or other hours first to weeks, then months, then years, and at last to infinity; thus bringing the sun to a stock-still on the meridian, to flood one side of the world with perpetual day and plunge the other in eternal night.

Which of these two hemispheres would be the worse abode, is matter of personal predilection; dust or glacier, deserts both. Everlasting unshielded noon would cause a wind circulation from all points of the enlightened periphery to the centre, whence a funnel-shaped current would rise to overflow back into the antipodes, thence to return by the horizon again. As the night side would be several hundred degrees at least colder than the noon one, all the moisture would be evaporated on the sunlit hemisphere, to be carried round and deposited as ice on the other, there to stay. Life would be either toasted or frappé. A Sahara backed by polar regions would be the obverse and the reverse of the shield.

The reader may deem the picture a fancy sketch which possibly may not appeal to him. Nevertheless,