The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson (distant reading TXT) 📕

I greeted it as a friend. It rose steadily, until about twenty degrees above the horizon. Then, it stopped suddenly, and, after a strange retrograde movement, hung motionless⁠—a great shield in the sky.9 Only the circular rim of the sun showed bright⁠—only this, and one thin streak of light near the equator.

Gradually, even this thread of light died out; and now, all that was left of our great and glorious sun was a vast dead disk, rimmed with a thin circle of bronze-red light.

XVIII The Green Star

The world was held in a savage gloom⁠—cold and intolerable. Outside, all was quiet⁠—quiet! From the dark room behind me, came the occasional, soft thud10 of falling matter⁠—fragments of rotting stone. So time passed, and night grasped the world, wrapping it in wrappings of impenetrable blackness.

There was no night-sky, as we know it. Even the few straggling stars had vanished, conclusively. I might have been in a shuttered room, without a light; for all that I could see. Only, in the impalpableness of gloom, opposite, burnt that vast, encircling hair of dull fire. Beyond this, there was no ray in all the vastitude of night that surrounded me; save that, far in the north, that soft, mistlike glow still shone.

Silently, years moved on. What period of time passed, I shall never know. It seemed to me, waiting there, that eternities came and went, stealthily; and still I watched. I could see only the glow of the sun’s edge, at times; for now, it had commenced to come and go⁠—lighting up a while, and again becoming extinguished.

All at once, during one of these periods of life, a sudden flame cut across the night⁠—a quick glare that lit up the dead Earth, shortly; giving me a glimpse of its flat lonesomeness. The light appeared to come from the sun⁠—shooting out from somewhere near its center, diagonally. A moment, I gazed, startled. Then the leaping flame sank, and the gloom fell again. But now it was not so dark; and the sun was belted by a thin line of vivid, white light. I stared, intently. Had a volcano broken out on the sun? Yet, I negatived the thought, as soon as formed. I felt that the light had been far too intensely white, and large, for such a cause.

Another idea there was, that suggested itself to me. It was, that one of the inner planets had fallen into the sun⁠—becoming incandescent, under that impact. This theory appealed to me as being more plausible, and accounting more satisfactorily for the extraordinary size and brilliance of the blaze that had lit up the dead world so unexpectedly.

Full of interest and emotion, I stared, across the darkness, at that line of white fire, cutting the night. One thing it told to me, unmistakably: the sun was yet rotating at an enormous speed.11 Thus, I knew that the years were still fleeting at an incalculable rate; though so far as the Earth was concerned, life, and light, and time, were things belonging to a period lost in the long gone ages.

After that one burst of flame, the light had shown, only as an encircling band of bright fire. Now, however, as I watched, it began slowly to sink into a ruddy tint, and, later, to a dark, copper-red color; much as the sun had done. Presently, it sank to a deeper hue; and, in a still further space of time, it began to fluctuate; having periods of glowing, and anon, dying. Thus, after a great while, it disappeared.

Long before this, the smoldering edge of the sun had deadened into blackness. And so, in that supremely future time, the world, dark and intensely silent, rode on its gloomy orbit around the ponderous mass of the dead sun.

My thoughts at this period can be scarcely described. At first, they were chaotic and wanting in coherence. But later, as the ages came and went, my soul seemed to imbibe the very essence of the oppressive solitude and dreariness that held the Earth.

With this feeling, there came a wonderful clearness of thought, and I realized, despairingly, that the world might wander forever through that enormous night. For a while, the unwholesome idea filled me with a sensation of overbearing desolation; so that I could have cried like a child. In time, however, this feeling grew, almost insensibly, less, and an unreasoning hope possessed me. Patiently, I waited.

From time to time, the noise of dropping particles, behind in the room, came dully to my ears. Once, I heard a loud crash, and turned, instinctively, to look; forgetting, for the moment, the impenetrable night in which every detail was submerged. In a while, my gaze sought the heavens; turning, unconsciously, toward the north. Yes, the nebulous glow still showed. Indeed, I could have almost imagined that it looked somewhat plainer. For a long time, I kept my gaze fixed upon it; feeling, in my lonely soul, that its soft haze was, in some way, a tie with the past. Strange, the trifles from which one can suck comfort! And yet, had I but known⁠—But I shall come to that in its proper time.

For a very long space, I watched, without experiencing any of the desire for sleep, that would so soon have visited me in the old Earth days. How I should have welcomed it; if only to have passed the time, away from my perplexities and thoughts.

Several times, the comfortless sound of some great piece of masonry falling, disturbed my meditations; and, once, it seemed I could hear whispering in the room, behind me. Yet it was utterly useless to try to see anything. Such blackness, as existed, scarcely can be conceived. It was palpable, and hideously brutal to the sense; as though something dead, pressed up against me⁠—something soft, and icily cold.

Under all this, there grew up within my mind a great and overwhelming distress of uneasiness, that left me,