Sturdy Boers, dusky Hottentots, Gold
Coast negroes, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, stood in the warmth of
the sunrise watching the setting of this strange new star.
And in a hundred observatories there had been suppressed excitement,
rising almost to shouting pitch, as the two remote bodies had rushed
together, and a hurrying to and fro, to gather photographic apparatus and
spectroscope, and this appliance and that, to record this novel,
astonishing sight, the destruction of a world. For it was a world, a
sister planet of our earth, far greater than our earth indeed, that had so
suddenly flashed into flaming death. Neptune it was had been struck,
fairly and squarely, by the strange planet from outer space, and the heat
of the concussion had incontinently turned two solid globes into one vast
mass of incandescence. Round the world that day, two hours before the
dawn, went the pallid great white star, fading only as it sank westward
and the sun mounted above it. Everywhere men marvelled at it, but of all
those who saw it none could have marvelled more than those sailors,
habitual watchers of the stars, who far away at sea had heard nothing of
its advent and saw it now rise like a pigmy moon and climb zenithward and
hang overhead and sink westward with the passing of the night.
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