In CS Lewis’ novel, The Magician’s Nephew, there is a description of a dying world towards the start of the book.
It is a land – Charn – which was once a great civilisation, but now is dead. As events unfold for the two children in the story, Polly and Digory, a terrible, tolling bell starts to chime, sounding over and over again, until ‘the air… was throbbing with it and they could feel the stone floor trembling under their feet…’ and the building around them begins to collapse.
In the sky, there is a great, tired, red sun, ‘a sun near the end of its life, weary of looking down upon that world.’ The great edifices of the city – temples, towers, palaces, pyramids – ‘cast long, disastrous-looking shadows in the light of that withered sun…’
