I did not know what was happening to me. We have all of us experienced those shadows from the future we call “premonitions.” I was not unfamiliar with them. It seemed as if I was inside a black stuffy room or invisible prison, where it was hard to draw breath, and from where I looked down on those brilliant scenes of sea and land that seemed to baffle and reject my sight, because of my state of mind. I kept thinking of Klorathy’s warning… just as the thought formed that his warnings were filling me with something I had only just recognised as terror, it happened…
What happened?
I have been asked often enough by our historians, delighted that just for once they had an actual eyewitness to such an event. And I always find this first moment hard.
There was an absolute stillness that seemed to freeze all of the scene below me. The air chilled—all at once, and instantaneously. I looked wildly around into the skies around me, with their Rohandan clouds and blue spaces—and could see nothing. Yet I was stilled, checked, silenced in all my being.
Suddenly—only that is not the word for the instantaneous nature of this happening—I was in total darkness, with the stars swinging about around me. I was in starlight. And now the stillness had been succeeded by a hissing roar. I looked down to see if the scene under me had also been vanished away, and saw that I was in movement—my craft was being spun about so that I could not see steadily. Yet I was able to make out the coastlands of the main landmass, and the islands, one of which was Adalantaland. My mind was clear only in flashes—as if lightning lit a landscape and then left it dark. This is why I had no coherent idea then of what was happening. Moments of intense clarity, when I was able to work out that Rohanda had turned over on itself, as a globe in a decelerating spin may wobble over—an understanding that this need no more affect the tiny inhabitants on its surface than the microbes of a child’s ball know that they are in violent and agitated movement as the ball is flung from hand to hand and bounced here and there, but continue complacently with their little lives—calculations of how this reversal of the planet might affect it… all this went on in my mind in those moments of brilliant thought, when that mind in fact worked at a level I have not known since, in between periods of black extinction.
I had no idea how long this thing went on, and can only say now that it was for some hours—so our astronomers have calculated. Suddenly—and again I have to emphasise that this word cannot in any way convey the feeling that the event happened in an order of time not Rohandan—I was back in sunlight. The scene below did not change—that is, not for a long moment. And then all at once, flick! just like that, Adalantaland vanished beneath the sea, and a whirlpool formed where it had been. My eyes drawn to that place, darkened in grief for the loss of those people, were nevertheless aware that all around the periphery of my vision islands were vanishing, leaving their spins of water, or land rising up—and sometimes islands would plunge under the waters and then almost at once rise up again, seeming to be settled there stable and permanent, and then, flick! they disappeared. When I was able to withdraw my immediate grief from Adalantaland, to gain a wider view, I was able to see that all over the great ocean the islands that studded it had gone.
And have not come back again since… and that is when the Isolated Northern Continent became permanently isolated. Though of course I am using that word relatively: often enough I have flown from one end of that enormous expanse of waters, with its few and clustered islands, and remembered those other times, and thought at how any moment those old islands may rise again, bare, water-scoured, to begin their slow process of weathering into fruitfulness and plenty. Not only islands were vanishing or appearing—everywhere the earth of the mainland was bulging up and buckling, and the waters were rocking and spouting and sloshing about as they do when someone jumps heavily into a water pool. There was a foul mineral smell. The scene grew wilder as I watched—as I intermittently watched, for I was being spun about and I could see only in flashes. Spouts of water miles high rose into the air and crashed thunderously, land spurted upwards like water, clouds formed in the skies in a swift massing process that seemed impossible—and then poured down at once in rain. Suddenly everything below was whitened: the rain had fallen as snow, and I was in a blizzard being whirled about in shrieking winds. And yet, immediately afterwards, the white had all gone, warm rains had washed the snow from the heaving, spurting, boiling surfaces of the globe, and I saw that the ice of the pole had gone, and where it had been was a spinning whirlpool—and then the spin of the water was slower, was hardly there, a crust was forming over it, and the white of the ice cover gleamed again, and spread, was rapidly growing.
Again I was in a thick snowstorm that seemed to be weighing down my little bubble. I felt that I was sinking down, was being pressed down, and then again—and with that same unimaginable suddenness—a wind arose from somewhere and carried me violently off. Of course none of my instruments was working, nor had worked since the start of this violent re-orientation of Rohanda. I did not know where I was being sucked or pulled, but felt that it was not any longer in a vortex or spin but was direct, in a straight line. And I was always inside the thick swirl of snow that was like no snow I had ever seen anywhere or on any planet. I knew I was being steadily pressed down by it and readied myself for a crash. Now that I was able to be more calm, because of this long steady drive onwards inside the storm, without sudden twists or dizzyings, I was able to hear again: beyond the dreadful hush of the snowfall and the howl of the wind that drove me were the multitudinous sounds of the earth itself, groaning and shrieking, moaning and grinding… this went on for some time, and yet, even as it did, there were sudden spaces or moments within this time when the opposite happened. I mean that I suddenly found myself in sun and wetness, clouds of steam arising everywhere and not a trace of snow to be seen anywhere under me: a water world, with spouts of water flung up to the height of my craft, lower now than it was, far too close to the earth, and in that space of—a few minutes? seconds?—I was able to direct my craft upwards, away from the churn of the muddy steamy land under me. And then the snow descended again and the cold was intense and frightful. I lost consciousness, I think, or at least if I did not, the awfulness of the strain has blocked out my memory. For what I remember next is that I had come to rest, and the crystal shell of my little space bubble was hot and glittery with sun. I was beyond rational thought, or decision, and I opened it stepped out—risking death from a change of atmosphere, though I certainly did not think of that. The sun struck me first. It had a different look to it. Seemed smaller… yet not much. Seemed cooler… but was that possible? I wondered if I been tossed off Rohanda altogether and had arrived on another planet.