That inertia is the tendency of a body, when cold, to stay cold; and when hot, to stay hot — that during Star-flux when the thin white lines which cross and crisscross the skies of night tremble and waver and bend and then, for a long, mad moment, tremble and waver and melt and become compressed into tiny, brilliant points of light, and pulse and throb — that on such occasions wise mariners never put out of port, for how can one steer? — that murrain-eels taint the water, which, once drunk of, turns the drinker into a homophage: rogue, mad, a skulker, solitary, incapable of sustaining his brute life on any food but men’s flesh, and that but new-dead — that Earth-flux is when that fixed dark corner of the sky which conceals the gate of Human Hell changes form and moves —

Avram Davidson, The Island Under the Earth (p.46)_

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