Читать книгу Dawn - S. Fowler Wright - Страница 6

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Dawn came on a ruined world. A world that was strewn with wreckage. A world in which all the interdependent complexities by which its civilization was sustained had been rudely broken; on fence and farmhouse and forest that the storm had flattened, on burning cities that rose up, a pillar of lurid smoke, as the wind fell, there came the light of the indifferent dawn. And as the north wind slackened, the water came across the sinking land. Not violently, as it had poured, one huge and dreadful wave, into the sunken Mediterranean basin: a wave which millions must have seen, but who that saw it could have lived to tell? Gently, inexorably, as the dawn-light pierced the heavy pall of air, red as with volcanic dust, tainted with the smoke of a thousand fires, the water rose. It spread gently over the Essex marshes. It lapped against the Thames Embankment with something more than a tidal lifting. Lapped, and spilled over, and spread widely, and more widely, in among the burning streets; for, in London, as in every city in southern England, there had been more conflagrations in the falling buildings than there was any hope of quenching, and every hour the fires had got a surer hold, while beneath the feet of a populace that fled the flooded fire-fringed streets in an ever-greater congestion of panic, there were a million rats that squealed and dodged, as they made their way to the higher ground which, in its turn, would fail them.

Watchers in the early morning, on the hills above the Severn Valley, looking down the broadening stretch of the Bristol Channel, saw a succession of advancing ripples, long gentle ripples, stretching from coast to coast, as though a giant stone had been thrown into the central waters; and as each ripple spread it lapped over a few miles farther of the level land. There was an upward rush of water in the river channel. Gloucester—Tewkesbury—Worcester—one by one as the morning passed were underneath the floods. At midday, the long waves heaved and broke against the barrier of the Malvern Hills. During the afternoon, the inexorable advance spread out around this ten-mile barrier, and flooded the higher Hereford levels on the farther side. Then it seemed, in one appalling moment, that the whole land westward of the Severn cleft, broke off, and Wales, with all its hills, slid downward, to be covered by a rush of water that had already drowned the lower Irish land. Eastward the water moved, drowning the Cotswold Hills, meeting the flood that had risen in the Thames Valley at an equal rate, lapping higher and higher around the northern Oxford wolds, and against the ridge which is the watershed of England, leaving tide-swept shallows, and islands here and there, with casual salvage of beast or man that fled across it just as the circling waters closed, or who had not tried to fly. But farther north, the land broke off, as it had done to westward—broke off, and sank away.

And all that day the northward roads were choked with flying crowds—that fled the horror of the southern flood, to perish even more surely when the farther north should sink beneath the waters. Ceaseless lines of rapid overloaded motors, held up continually by the impedimenta of the storm-strewn roads, or by the accidents of their own impatience; offering wild rewards—anything but the priceless-seeming benefit of the lift in the overcrowded vehicle—to pedestrians who would help to drag aside the broken tree, to clear the rubble of the fallen wall; cursing the slowness of men who worked heroically to keep the roadways clear, or frightening the slower cars with threats or actual violence into the byways that soon became as congested as the wider roads.

So the day passed, and the next sun rose on an ocean that had spread from the Rocky Mountains to the northern coasts of Africa, and had obliterated the isolation of the Baltic Sea.