Ignatius Donnelly

“ They wander, breathing a foul and sickening atmosphere, under the shadow of an awful darkness, a darkness which knows no morning, no stars, no moon; a darkness palpable and visible, lighted only by electrical discharges from the abyss of clouds, with such roars of thunder as we, in this day of harmonious nature, can form no conception of. It is, indeed, "chaos and ancient night." All the forces of nature are there, but disorderly, destructive, battling against each other, and multiplied a thousand-fold in power; the winds are cyclones, magnetism is gigantic, electricity is appalling. ”

“ With her is another comet, Typhaon; they beget the Chimæra, that breathes resistless fire, fierce, huge, swift. And Typhaon, associated with both these, is the most dreadful monster of all, born of Hell and sensual sin, a serpent, a fierce dragon, many-headed, with dusky tongues and fire gleaming; sending forth dreadful and appalling noises, while mountains and fields rock with earthquakes; chaos has come; the earth, the sea boils; there is unceasing tumult and contention, and in the midst the monster, wounded and broken up, falls upon the earth ”

“ The dead under the waters tremble; hell is naked, in the blazing heat, and destruction is uncovered; the north, the cold, descends on the world; the waters are bound up in thick clouds; the face of God's throne, the sun, is bidden by the clouds spread upon it; darkness has come, day and night are all one; the earth trembles; he has lighted up the heavens with the fiery comet, shaped like a crooked serpent, but he has struck him as Indra struck Vritra. ”

“ Man, by an inherited instinct, regards the comet as a great terror and a great foe; and the heart of humanity sits uneasily when one blazes in the sky. Even to the scholar and the scientist they are a puzzle and a fear; they are erratic, unusual, anarchical, monstrous--something let loose, like a tiger of the heavens, athwart an orderly, peaceful, and harmonious world. They may be impalpable and harmless attenuations of gas, or they way be loaded with death and ruin; but in any event man can not contemplate them without terror. ”

“ If the ice in which that Siberian mammoth was incased had preserved it intact for a hundred years, or a thousand years, why might it not have preserved it for ten thousand, for a hundred thousand years?
Place a universal legend in the minds of a race, let them repeat it from generation to generation, and time ceases to be an element in the problem.
Legend has one great foe to its perpetuation--civilization.
Civilization brings with it a contempt for everything which it can not understand; skepticism becomes the synonym for intelligence; men no longer repeat; they doubt ”

“ The scientist picks up a fragment of stone--the fool would fling it away with a laugh,--but the philosopher sees in it the genesis of a world; from it he can piece out the detailed history of ages; he finds in it, perchance, a fossil of the oldest organism, the first traces of that awful leap from matter to spirit, from dead earth to endless life; that marvel of marvels, that miracle of all miracles, by which dust and water and air live, breathe, think, reason, and cast their thoughts abroad through time and space and eternity. ”

“ The light increases. The warmth lifts up part of the water already cast down, and the outflow of the steaming ice-fields, and pours it down again in prodigious floods. It is an age of storms.
The people who have escaped gather together. They know the sun is coming back. They know this desolation is to pass away. They build great fires and make human sacrifices to bring back the sun. They point and guess where he will appear; for they have lost all knowledge of the cardinal points. And all this is told in the legends. ”

“ Harshly then he thundered, and heavily and terribly the earth re-echoed around; and the broad heaven above, and the sea and streams of ocean, and the abysses of earth. But beneath his immortal feet vast Olympus trembled, as the king uprose and earth groaned beneath. And the heat from both caught the dark-colored sea, both of the thunder and the lightning, and fire from the monster, the heat arising from the thunder-storms, winds, and burning lightning. And all earth, and heaven, and sea, were boiling; and huge billows roared around the shores about and around, beneath the violence of the gods ”

“ Atlas was the king, or god, of Atlantis. In the old time all kings were gods. They are something more than men, to the multitude, even yet.
And when we reach "Ragnarok" in these Gothic legends, when the jaw of the wolf Fenris reached from the earth to the sun, and he vomits fire and poison, and when Surt, and all the forces of Muspel, "ride over Bifrost, it breaks to pieces." That is to say, in this last great catastrophe of the earth, the ridge of land that led from the British Islands to Atlantis goes down for ever. ”

“ O Lord, thou hast held it good to forsake us in these days, according to the counsel that thou hast as well in heaven as in hades,--alas for us, in that thine anger and indignation has descended upon us in these days; alas in that the many and grievous afflictions of thy wrath have overgone, and swallowed us up, coming down even as stones, spears, and arrows upon the wretches that inhabit the earth!--this is the sore pestilence with which we are afflicted and almost destroyed. O valiant and all-powerful Lord, the common people are almost made an end of and destroyed ”

“ How wonderfully does all this accord with what we have shown would follow from the earth's contact with a comet!
The earth is wet and covered with mud, the clay; the sun is long absent; at last he returns; he dries the mud, but his face is still covered with the remnants of the great cloud-belt; "his heat has no strength"; he shows himself only in glimpses; he shines through the fogs like an image in a mirror ”

“ And then the question arises, How did they hit upon a lie that accords so completely with the revelations of science? They possessed no great public works, in that infant age, which would penetrate through hundreds of feet of débris, and lay bare the decomposed rocks beneath; therefore they did not make a theory to suit an observed fact.
And how did mankind come to be reduced to a handful? If men grew, in the first instance, out of bestial forms, mindless and speechless, they would have propagated and covered the world as did the bear and the wolf. ”

“ In what stage of development was mankind when the Drift fell upon the earth?
It is, of course, difficult to attain to certainties in the consideration of an age so remote as this. We are, as it were, crawling upon our hands and knees into the dark cavern of an abysmal past; we know not whether that which we encounter is a stone or a bone; we can only grope our way. ”

“ And the attractive power of the comet, great enough to bold its gigantic mass in place through the long reaches of the fields of space, and even close up to the burning eye of the awful sun itself, holds its dust and pebbles and bowlders together until the very moment of impact with the earth. In short, they, the dust and stones, do not continue to follow the comet, because the earth has got in their way and arrested them. ”

“ The forests are gone; the fruit-trees are swept away; the beasts of the chase have perished; the domestic animals, gentle ministers to man, have disappeared; the cultivated fields are buried deep in drifts of mud and gravel; the people stagger in the darkness against each other; they fall into the chasms of the earth; within them are the two great oppressors of humanity, hunger and terror; hunger that knows not where to turn; fear that shrinks before the whirling blasts, the rolling thunder, the shocks of blinding lightning ”

“ While no mile-thick ice-sheet descends to the Mediterranean or the Gulf of Mexico, glaciers intrude into all the valleys, and the flora and fauna of the temperate regions become arctic; that is to say, only those varieties of plants and animals survive in those regions that are able to stand the cold, and these we now call arctic.
In the midst of this darkness and cold and snow, the remnants of poor humanity wander over the face of the desolated world; stumbling, awe-struck, but filled with an insatiable hunger which drives them on ”

“ No trace is left of their destructive powers, save the huge, unstratified, unfossiliferous deposits of clay and stones and bowlders, locked away between great layers of the sedimentary rocks.
Can it be that there wanders through immeasurable space, upon an orbit of such size that millions of years are required to complete it, some monstrous luminary, so vast that when it returns to us it fills a large part of the orbit which the earth describes around the sun, and showers down upon us deluges of débris, while it fills the world with flame? ”

“ In other words, I don't think this thing is right, and, though I tear my flesh with my teeth, and contemplate suicide, and though I may be slain for speaking, yet I will speak out, and maintain that God ought not to have done this thing; he ought not to have sent this horrible affliction on the earth--this fire from heaven, which burned up my cattle; this whirlwind which slew my children; this sand of the sea; this rush of floods; this darkness in noonday in which mankind grope helplessly ”

“ We will find hereafter a whole body of legends about "the stealing of the clouds" and their restoration. The veil thickens. The sun's rays are shut out. It grows colder; more condensation follows. The heavens darken. Louder and louder bellows the thunder. We shall see the lightnings represented, in myth after myth, as the arrows of the rescuing demi-god who saves the world. The heat has carried up perhaps one fourth of all the water of the world into the air. ”

“ So, among all the races which went out from this heavenly land, this land of high intelligence, this land of the master race, it was remembered down through the ages, and dwelt upon and sung of until it moved upward from the waters of the Atlantic to the distant skies, and became a spiritual heaven. And the ridges which so strangely connected it with the continents, east and west, became the bridges over which the souls of men must pass to go from earth to heaven. ”

“ The great molten ball within remains intact, though sorely torn; in its center is still the force we call gravity; the fragments of the crust can not fly off into space; they are constrained to follow the master-power lodged in the ball, which now becomes the nucleus of a comet, still blazing and burning, and vomiting flames, and wearing itself away. The catastrophe has disarranged its course, but it still revolves in a prolonged orbit around the sun, carrying its broken débris in a long trail behind it. ”

“ If I am right, despite these incalculable tons of matter piled on the earth, despite heat and cyclones and darkness and ice and floods, not even a tender tropical plant fit to adorn or sustain man's life was blotted out; not an animal valuable for domestication was exterminated; and not even the great inventions which man had attained to, during the Tertiary Age, were lost. Nothing died but that which stood in the pathway of man's development,--the monstrous animals, the Neanderthal races, the half-human creatures intermediate between man and the brute. ”

“ IN the first place, the Drift fell upon a fair and lovely world, a world far better adapted to give happiness to its inhabitants than this storm-tossed planet on which we now live, with its endless battle between heat and cold, between sun and ice. ”

“ Our theology, even where science has most ridiculed it, is based on a great, a gigantic truth. Paradise, the summer land of fruits, the serpent, the fire from heaven, the expulsion, the waving sword, the "fall of man," the "darkness on the face of the deep," the age of toil and sweat--all, all, are literal facts. ”