Omega by Camille Flammarion — Read

In the ruins of the other equatorial city, occupying a once submerged valley south of the island of Ceylon, was a young girl, whose mother and older sister had perished of consumption and cold, and who was now left alone, the last surviving member of the last family of the race. A few trees, of northern species, had been preserved under the spacious dome of glass, and beneath their scanty foliage, holding the cold hands of her mother who had died the night before, the young girl sat alone, doomed to death in the very flower of her age. The night was cold. In the sky above the full moon shone like a golden torch, but its yellow rays were as cold as the silver beams of the ancient Selene. In the vast room reigned the stillness and solitude of death, broken only by the young girl's breathing, which seemed to animate the silence with the semblance of life.

She was not weeping. Her sixteen years contained more experience and knowledge than sixty years of the world's prime. She knew that she was the sole survivor of this last group of human beings, and that every happiness, every joy and every hope had vanished forever. There was no present, no future; only solitude and silence, the physical and moral impossibility of life, and soon eternal sleep. She thought of the woman of bygone days, of those who had lived the real life of humanity, of lovers, wives and mothers, but to her red and tearless eyes appeared only images of death; while beyond the walls of glass stretched a barren desert, covered by the last ice and the last snow. Now her young heart beat violently in her breast, till her slender hands could no longer compress its tumult; and now life seemed arrested in her bosom, and every respiration suspended. If for a moment she fell asleep, in her dreams she played again with her laughing and carefree sister, while her mother sung in a pure and penetrating voice the beautiful inspirations of the last poets; and she seemed to see, once more, the last fêtes of a brilliant society, as if reflected from the surface of some distant mirror. Then, on awakening, these magic memories faded into the somber reality. Alone! Alone in the world, and tomorrow death, without having known life! To struggle against this unavoidable fate was useless; the decree of destiny was without appeal, and there was nothing to do but to submit, to await the inevitable end, since without food or air organic life was impossible -- or else to anticipate death and deliver oneself at once from a joyless existence and a certain doom. She passed into the bathroom, where the warm water was still flowing, although the appliances which art had designed to supply the wants of life were no longer in working order; for the last remaining servants (descendants of ancient simian species, modified, as the human race had been, by the changing conditions of life,) had also succumbed to the insufficiency of water. She plunged into the perfumed bath, turned the key which regulated the supply of electricity derived from subterranean watercourses still unfrozen, and for a moment seemed to forget the decree of destiny in the enjoyment of this refreshing rest. Had any indiscreet spectator beheld her as, standing upon the bearskin before the large mirror, she began to arrange the tresses of her long auburn hair, he would have detected a smile upon her lips, showing that, for an instant, she was oblivious of her dark future. Passing into another room, she approached the apparatus which furnished the food of that time, extracted from the water, air, and the plants and fruits automatically cultivated in the greenhouses.