Lovecraft, H P & Barlow, R H - Till A' The Seas

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Till A’ the Seas

by H. P. Lovecraft and R. H Barlow

Written Jan 1935

Published Summer 1935 in The Californian, 3, No. 1, 3-7.

Upon an eroded cliff-top rested the man, gazing far across the valley. Lying thus, he

could see a great distance, but in all the sere expanse there was no visible motion.

Nothing stirred the dusty plain, the disintegrated sand of long-dry river-beds, where once

coursed the gushing streams of Earth’s youth. There was little greenery in this ultimate

world, this final stage of mankind’s prolonged presence upon the planet. For unnumbered

aeons the drought and sandstorms had ravaged all the lands. The trees and bushes had

given way to small, twisted shrubs that persisted long through their sturdiness; but these,

in turn, perished before the onslaught of coarse grasses and stringy, tough vegetation of

strange evolution.

The ever-present heat, as Earth drew nearer to the sun, withered and killed with pitiless

rays. It had not come at once; long aeons had gone before any could feel the change. And

all through those first ages man’s adaptable form had followed the slow mutation and

modelled itself to fit the more and more torrid air. then the day had come when men

could bear their hot cities but ill, and a gradual recession began, slow yet deliberate.

Those towns and settlements closest to the equator had been first, of course, but later

there were others. Man, softened and exhausted, could cope no longer with the ruthlessly

mounting heat. It seared him as he was, and evolution was too slow to mould new

resistances in him.

Yet not at first were the great cities of the equator left to the spider and the scorpion. In

the early years there were many who stayed on, devising curious shields and armours

against the heat and the deadly dryness. These fearless souls, screening certain buildings

against the encroaching sun, made miniature worlds of marvellously ingenious things, so

that for a while men persisted in the rusting towers, hoping thereby to cling to old lands

till the searing should be over. For many would not believe what the astronomers said,

and looked for a coming of the mild olden world again. But one day the men of Dath,

from the new city of Niyara, made signals to Yuanario, their immemorially ancient

capital, and gained no answer from the few who remained therein. And when explorers

reached that millennial city of bridge-linked towers they found only silence. There was

not even the horror of corruption, for the scavenger lizards had been swift.

Only then did the people fully realize that these cities were lost to them; know that they

must forever abandon them to nature. The other colonists in the hot lands fled from their

brave posts, and total silence reigned within the high basalt walls of a thousand empty

towns. Of the denser throngs and multitudinous activities of the past, nothing finally

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Lovecraft, H P & Barlow, R H - Till A' The Seas

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