Omega - Camille Flammarion (free ebooks for android txt) 📗

names which to us seem immortal, Confucius, Plato, Muhammad, Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon, had perished and were forgotten. Art had, indeed, preserved noble memories; but these memories did not extend as far back as the infancy of humanity, and reached only a few million years into the past. Omegar lingered in an ancient gallery of pictures, bequeathed by former centuries, and contemplated the great cities which had disappeared. Only one of these pictures related to what had once been Europe, and was a view of Paris, consisting of a promontory projecting into the sea, crowned by an astronomical temple and gay with helicopterons circling above the lofty towers of its terraces. Immense ships were plowing the sea. This classic Paris was the Paris of the one hundred and seventieth century of the Christian era, corresponding to the one hundred and fifty-seventh of the astronomical era⁠—the Paris which existed immediately prior to the final submergence of the land. Even its name had changed; for words change like persons and things. Nearby, other pictures portrayed the great but less ancient cities which had risen in America, Australia, Asia, and afterwards upon the continents which had emerged from the ocean. And so this museum of the past recalled in succession the passing pomps of humanity down to the end.

The end! The hour had struck on the timepiece of destiny. Omegar knew the life of the world henceforth was in the past, that no future existed for it, and that the present even was vanishing like the dream of a moment. The last heir of the human race felt the overwhelming sentiment of the vanity of things. Should he wait for some inconceivable miracle to save him from his fate? Should he bury his companions, and share their tomb with them? Should he endeavor to prolong for a few days, a few weeks, a few years even, a solitary, useless and despairing existence? All day long he wandered through the vast and silent galleries, and at night abandoned himself to the drowsiness which oppressed him. All about him was dark⁠—the darkness of the sepulchre.

A sweet dream, however, stirred his slumbering thought, and surrounded his soul with a halo of angelic brightness. Sleep brought him the illusion of life. He was no longer alone. A seductive image which he had seen more than once before, stood before him. Eyes caressing as the light of heaven, deep as the infinite, gazed upon him and attracted him. He was in a garden filled with the perfume of flowers. Birds sang in the nests amid the foliage. And in the distant landscape, framed in plants and flowers, were the vast ruins of dead cities. Then he saw a lake, on whose rippling surface two swans glided, bearing a cradle from which a newborn child stretched toward him its arms.

Never had such a ray of light illuminated his soul. So deep was his emotion that he suddenly awoke, opened his eyes, and found confronting him only the somber reality. Then a sadness more terrible even than any he had known filled his whole being. He could not find an instant of repose. He rose, went to his couch, and waited anxiously for the morning. He remembered his dream, but he did not believe in it. He felt, vaguely, that another human being existed somewhere; but his degenerate race had lost, in part, its psychic power, and perhaps, also, woman always exerts upon man an attraction more powerful than that which man exerts upon woman. When the day broke, when the last man saw the ruins of his ancient city standing out upon the sky of dawn, when he found himself alone with the two last dead, he realized more than ever his unavoidable destiny, and decided to terminate at once a life so hopelessly miserable.

Going into the laboratory, he sought a bottle whose contents were well known to him, uncorked it, and carried it to his lips, to empty it at a draught. But, at the very moment the vial touched his lips, he felt a hand upon his arm.

He turned suddenly. There was no one in the laboratory, and in the gallery he found only the two dead.

V

In the ruins of the other equatorial city, occupying a once submerged valley south of the island of Ceylon, was a young girl, whose mother and older sister had perished of consumption and cold, and who was now left alone, the last surviving member of the last family of the race. A few trees, of northern species, had been preserved under the spacious dome of glass, and beneath their scanty foliage, holding the cold hands of her mother who had died the night before, the young girl sat alone, doomed to death in the very flower of her age. The night was cold. In the sky above the full moon shone like a golden torch, but its yellow rays were as cold as the silver beams of the ancient Selene. In the vast room reigned the stillness and solitude of death, broken only by the young girl’s breathing, which seemed to animate the silence with the semblance of life.

She was not weeping. Her sixteen years contained more experience and knowledge than sixty years of the world’s prime. She knew that she was the sole survivor of this last group of human beings, and that every happiness, every joy and every hope had vanished forever. There was no present, no future; only solitude and silence, the physical and moral impossibility of life, and soon eternal sleep. She thought of the woman of bygone days, of those who had lived the real life of humanity, of lovers, wives and mothers, but to her red and tearless eyes appeared only images of death; while beyond the walls of glass stretched a barren desert, covered by the last ice and the last snow. Now her young heart beat violently in her breast, till her slender hands could no longer compress