Chapter 5
The Warning of the Last Moon
WHEN NATURE issues a decree, the execution thereof is pitiless. She recks naught of dynasties or nations. When she would have a clean page on which to write, she erases, if needs be, and with inexorable completeness, the fairest characters she may have inscribed previously. The smallest and the greatest, the tiny grass blade, the towering forest giant, the lowly anthill, the lofty mountain, the blind worm in the dust, proud man, the "lord of Creation"— be any or all of these in her path. Nature breaks them, and, with her ally, Time, makes smooth the page for her next writing.
Only those who are wise and instructed may pore over such an erasure and, from a faint trace here, a blur there, partly read and partly guess at that which once was writ.
Yea
