Cold

Not accident nor illness, mishap nor malady, not warmth nor water nor desire of water; but the Cold. Is this, at last, the doom inevitable; the patient doom that can outwait the others, that though all they should fail us will not fail?

The man of science, who cancels flood by drought and drought by flood, laughs at all fiery threatenings and puts comet-fears with fairytales, now laughs no longer. Even he knows the world must die, and this is his chosen death. He plumps for the cold and the darkness.

Nor is he here in conflict with older prophets: some Hebrew ones⁠—the day of the Lord, cried Amos, it is darkness and not light⁠—and Norse ones, who foretold that Balder god of brightness must die in the end, when Fimbul-Winter will return again and forever. Nor in conflict with the heart’s own last vision of terror⁠—Eternity: the Cold and the Darkness.

On this hypothesis, as on others, there may be cooperation for destruction. Cold may be bound up with or incidental to or helped out by some other agency.

Many, perhaps most, adherents of the No Water school, think we shall hardly get so far as to fail of direct drought. Water, which absorbs, retains and gives out again the heat the sun sendeth, in slowly disappearing from the atmosphere is rendering it slowly colder. No oxygen will save, when that fractional drop of water becomes more fractional; the world will become too cold to live in, as a result of its dryness, before it becomes too dry.

Our vanishing air⁠—not only the vanishing water in it⁠—secretly collaborates. It is going the way of the moon’s lost atmosphere; with it will go our best protection from the cold; without it we shall succumb. It will lessen as the sun’s heat lessens, just when we need it most.

The terrestrial movements contribute. Whereby we may die of cold in two separate stages: one hemisphere of earlier palsy, the other of final frost. Earth’s two different forms of rotation proceeding at different speeds, partition strains result; the strains become tides; the tides act as brakes. Forspent, the world slows down; halts, wearily creeps to paralysis. At last the two rotations will coincide. In that hour, there will be no seasons more: one hemisphere will be turned forever to the night; the other, warmer awhile, all the year and for all the years to the sun⁠—till he too, the prime destroyer, shall go out and, all other deaths avoided, achieve man’s total end.

What is the Sun?

Hor, Sol, Ra; Sūrya Mitra, Savitr; Helios, Phaethon, Phoebus Apollo⁠—he has had many names; many temples from Persia to Mexico, from Stonehenge to Xauxa, from the high Quirinal in Rome, golden Rome⁠—Urbs solaris imperialis⁠—to golden Cuzco, gold within, gold without, Cosa Sagrada, la imperial ciudad. In every mythology he has been a deity, or at the lowest a mighty man⁠—do the Andaman Islanders confirm their title as the lowest of peoples by accounting him a woman, and the wife of the moon at that? He has been worshipped since there were worshippers, adored since souls knew adoration. He is a god.

He is a star. A middle-aged star of middle size and, as social brilliance in the heavens is reckoned, of strictly middle-class station: no Betelgeuse for bulk, no Sirius for glory, Companion of Sirius for dwarf intensity of glory. His burning heart is enclosed within the photosphere, a layer of red-hot ocean of gas, deeper than Asia, lashed all around into waves and Everest-high jets of scarlet spray that from the earth would sprinkle the moon; the chromosphere, his cloak of helium and hydrogen; the corona of coronium; the light zodiacal. His heat in the centre runs to millions, at the surface to thousands of degrees. Better guide than the mercury is to feel him shining in his strength on a Sahara noon, an Aden teatime, and to reflect that he is sending us a two thousand millionth part of it, and sending it from over ninety million miles away.

He has had children. Under most theories of the world’s origin⁠—nebular, tidal, planetesimal, collisional⁠—he is our parent, ancestor, creator; by him we had life. Under all physical theories of the world’s present, by him we live.

Lucerna Mundi, lantern of the world, by him we see.

He maintains the seas, the lakes and the rivers. He keeps in gaseous state the air we must breathe, in liquid state the water we and all living things must absorb⁠—so much whereof as we need he vapourizes and turns into clouds, which he drives the winds to distribute for us. He enables the plants to assimilate their food from the air, and so is the author of all fruits, flowers and trees; the wine we drink and the wood we burn are directly informed of him, the warmth they give us is indirectly his. His spots pulsate, and we pulsate in answer. Electricity, radioactivity and their thousand daughter inventions are his; and the force in our brains and in our bodies. In him we live and move and have our being. Without him we are not.

And he is dying.

Through all those asserted certainties⁠—water, fire and the rest⁠—we had come so far to none so absolute. It is a fact no closing of eyes, no denying of objective reality can avert, no mystical-mathematical four-dimensional universe of point-events and curved space-time can exclude, no magical non-dimensional universe of God’s Dream or the Devil’s can abolish; within the framework of every scheme and every schemelessness the same will happen, the sun will die⁠—just as each one of us will die in his time, whatever the grand plan or no-plan of the terrible universe may be.

Optimism seeks to prolong his life a little. Declares him of low density, susceptible of much further compression, able for long ages yet to generate more heat than he radiates. Chemical processes reinforce the contractional one, radioactive processes the chemical: the transmutation of his store of radial elements is a process almost everlasting, ensuring him effluence of light almost stanchless. His positive and negative ions bombard each other, whose mutual annihilation secures their common eternity as heat. Millions of meteors rush hourly upon him, their high speed compensating for their lowly size and making them substantial augmenters and preservers. Above all he is young, still in the bright earlier yellow-heat stage that (on one of the stubborner new theories of stellar evolution) precedes the white-heat of middle life and far precedes the sere later yellow-heat stage, the second childhood, the long late afternoon of stars. Even when at last he should dwindle, the earth would then be moving nearer him, and thus be keeping pace⁠—and keeping warm.

Pessimism curtails it. Density is high; compression peak was passed long ago; generation of new heat has ceased and only radiation is continuing, at the rate of two hundred and fifty million tons a minute, three hundred and sixty thousand million tons a day. If chemically engendered, his warmth has not long to last; a piece of coal is soon burnt out. Though radial transmutation be proceeding, and the loud cannonades of ionization, either is at best an “almost” eternal process; which means nothing, piteous nothing. The meteors are paltry helpers; if he attracted enough of them to be worth while, his size would continually be increasing; and it is not increasing. Above all he is old; astrophysically provable in the second yellow era. Even were he not dwindling away, the earth would always be getting less of his heat, since ever receding from him into the cold outer distance.

Leave all such hopes and counter-hopes. Leave aside the sunspots and other such famous regions of solar controversy. Leave out of account the respective chances of his entering a colder corner of the universe or a warmer⁠—look away altogether from the sun himself. Look back to the earth, or beyond to the stars.

Chronometrically classified by spectral seniority, the stars are known by their age. Like man they pass through seven ages, passing from one to the next with as much choice or chance of rebellion as has he. Whether the sun’s epoch be that of early middle-age or late, the difference is at most between a very little more than half his course to run or a very little less. The whole course must be run, till the seventh age and last.

That the earth was once warmer than now, there is persuasive testimony. Despite cyclical reversions, such as the present warm spell following the last ice age, and even though the ice ages be not caused, or not chiefly caused, by diminution in the solar heat but by this or that wayward difference of ellipticity in the earth’s own orbit or whatnot else⁠—even so, the line of the thermic graph is in the long run always downward. After each glacial era the warm reaction is less warm than the time before. The lull after the Cambrian Ice Age was out of comparison warmer than this. There were no deciduous trees. Could the Coal Forests flourish in South Wales or North France today? Could the reptiles now stretch from pole to pole? As late as the warm centuries after the last ice age but one, no permanent snow and ice remained; the polar caps are brand-new. If Arctic fossils are found embedded in what are now warmer climes, as the famous reindeer of Southern France, tropical fauna and flora are far oftener found in what are now colder regions. The primates, we and the monkeys, originated in the Arctic Circle; Peary found Eden. Greenland was once green; amid her Icy Mountains did not the breadfruit trees once wave? Were not the London tubes, a few yards below our streets, cut through clay that enclosed great tropical shells? Does not the Southern Railway, as it crawls over Kent, but piously emulate its predecessors there, the crocodiles? In Paradise⁠—

Si plain de joye et de solas
Que nus n’y puet devenir las⁠—

did not the sun, as Adam long afterwards told Seth, shine daily, all day, deliciously? In the Golden Age was not the world warmer and lovelier, while happiness stretched to the far north? Then the flight from the Poles began. It will continue till we huddle on the Equator.

Man will fight his fate. He will adapt himself. Even today he can survive in parts of Siberia that in January are no warmer than the moon. He will adapt nature; will learn to utilize the earth’s internal heat, if need be moving underground to become a cave-dweller again, and to economize the sun’s. His industries, by chance and then deliberately, will increase the amount of carbonic gas in the air, and so help the latter to retain heat, increase heat, and distribute it more evenly. Heat thus eked out with a hundred strange inventions, light he will learn to dispense with. In ways we cannot conceive of, any more than the mole or the mastodon could conceive of ours, our descendant race, if still on the planet millions of years from now⁠—Man let us still proudly dub him⁠—will be fighting for his life; every secret of terrible science, every trick of his terrified brain, will be called into play to hold up, perhaps for ages, the inevitable end.

Inevitable. As the sun’s light and warmth grow less, the means of artificially conserving them will grow more complicated, and after a while less efficient. By when, despite all strugglings, all undreamt marvels, all delays, the temperature must have fallen by forty or fifty degrees everywhere, earth will have changed from anything we can imagine, will have dwindled to a belt of Equatorial Eskimos white-girdling the icebound tropics. Dimness of anguish; dayfall of the world. God will have fulfilled His grim promises: He will have darkened the sun in his going forth, He will have made their vintage shouting to cease.

Down by sixty or seventy, there will be no life more; and earth a bleak charnel-house, a whited sepulchre. The oceans, if still existent, will be of ice; the clouds, if still any, will be of snow. No wind, no warmth, no rain; no flesh wherein is the breath of life. The cold and the darkness.

The last man will have lain long unburied across the equator of the ageing wizened globe, long have forgotten the story of splendour and sorrow of the strange race that perished with him, long have forgotten the dwindling purple sun his eyes beheld in the moment when they closed forever.

Like the frozen corpse, or vespillo of corpses, still whirling around him, the sun in his turn will die. A solid crust will form; gases will become oceans, molten lava dry land. Death will come upon him more quickly; he will receive no vivifying rays from outside, as the earth did from him; the sun will have no sun. More swiftly will his oceans turn to ice, his atmosphere descend on him as a pall of fine white snow. Seen from far off⁠—seen by Whom?⁠—he will change from gold to vespertine yellow, to red, to dark purple; then to sackcloth of hair, frozen black.

When he too is gone, with whatever race of beings his cooling-time may have witnessed upon him, the last men of earth will countless myriads of years have been dead. He mourned them, perhaps; himself will die threneless.