wished to know, most liked to believe, is that Nature, the whole universe of Nature, is itself but a troubled night of being; and that when Nature has come to some kind of end, the night of existence will have come to an end also. Beyond will have to be some kind of day, endless day. Our human race has always believed or has tried to believe that on the Natureward confines of that day it will be discovered, assembled there, waiting there, having journeyed thither somehow: no matter how, so it arrive. For however dull and petty man may be, however despicable, brutish, abandoned, there has been no lack of sublimity in his vision, in his faith, of what he is to be: that after the last star has gone out in the night of Nature, the orb of his soul will have but begun to flash the immortality of its dawn.

Once and for an immeasurable time the whole earth was warm, and life on it being warmth, the life on it was everywhere. That was Nature’s particular hour of the night just then—it called for a warm earth completely covered with life. Then one day something took place that had never taken place before. For the first time, for the very first time in the experience of the earth, out of one of its clouds there began to fall, not what had always fallen in the past, drops of rain, but tiny white crystals. At first they were few; then more and more; then myriads, myriads, myriads, until the air grew grey with the thick host of them. Finally the scene became as if the sky were the floor of the desert, an upper inverted desert floor covered with fine white sand, with sand-dunes; and the winds, sweeping and roaring across this desert floor, lifted the dunes, scattered them and swept them along: avalanches of white sand, cloudy landslides of white sand—blown toward the earth underneath. No creature there below had ever seen the like; and as those avalanches slided down on their heads and backs, tumult, fear, flight followed. Perhaps caught in the raging, roaring tempest, perhaps having lost its way, some bird of brilliant-red plumage flew round and round like a wandering ball of fire, uttering its cry of bewilderment, of helplessness, of its fate—the prophetic note of the fate of everything.

When the first of these strange cold white crystals struck the warm earth, at once they vanished. So that for a while the vast catastrophe looked like some unfeeling prank of the clouds, some too grave a trick, heartless deception. But faster than the first could melt, others came, more, more, until the later ones arrived before the earlier ones had disappeared. And then they began to stay where they fell. They began to stay and to pile up one on another; they began to make a white spot, a frozen spot. We know nothing as to how and when and where; yet we are bound to understand that some time there was the first snowcloud, somewhere the first snowstorm, the first snowbank.

No human eye beheld it: there was to be no human eye for untold ages yet. But there was one who saw, one who was present, one who had brought it to pass—Time; and now that the first white spot was prepared and ready like some new flat marble slab, bordered round with the earth’s green and awaiting humanwise its due inscription, Time glanced at it, approved it, stepped forward and stooping down wrote three words in the sand—in the white sand of the sky:

HIC JACET TERRA.