"Wells, H G - The Door In The Wall, And Other Stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wells H G)

hemispheres were made aware for the first time of the real
importance of this unusual apparition in the heavens. "A Planetary
Collision," one London paper headed the news, and proclaimed
Duchaine's opinion that this strange new planet would probably
collide with Neptune. The leader writers enlarged upon the topic;
so that in most of the capitals of the world, on January 3rd, there
was an expectation, however vague of some imminent phenomenon in
the sky; and as the night followed the sunset round the globe,
thousands of men turned their eyes skyward to see--the old familiar
stars just as they had always been.

Until it was dawn in London and Pollux setting and the stars
overhead grown pale. The Winter's dawn it was, a sickly filtering
accumulation of daylight, and the light of gas and candles shone
yellow in the windows to show where people were astir. But the
yawning policeman saw the thing, the busy crowds in the markets
stopped agape, workmen going to their work betimes, milkmen, the
drivers of news-carts, dissipation going home jaded and pale,
homeless wanderers, sentinels on their beats, and in the country,
labourers trudging afield, poachers slinking home, all over the
dusky quickening country it could be seen--and out at sea by seamen
watching for the day--a great white star, come suddenly into the
westward sky!

Brighter it was than any star in our skies; brighter than the
evening star at its brightest. It still glowed out white and
large, no mere twinkling spot of light, but a small round clear
shining disc, an hour after the day had come. And where science
has not reached, men stared and feared, telling one another of the
wars and pestilences that are foreshadowed by these fiery signs in
the Heavens. 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