A moment he studied her. Then he nodded, and grew very grave.
“Forgive me,” he whispered, laying a hand on her shoulder. Once more he turned to the window and Looked out.
“So then, it’s all gone?” he queried, speaking as to himself. “Only a skyscraper standing here or there? And the bridges and the islands—all changed.
“Not a sign of life anywhere; not a sound; the forests growing thick among the ruins? A dead world if—if all the world is like this part of it! All dead, save you and me!”
In silence they stood there, striving to realize the full import of the catastrophe. And Stern, deep down in his heart, caught some glimmering insight of the future and was glad.
CHAPTER III. ON THE TOWER PLATFORM
SUDDENLY the girl started, rebelling against the evidence of her own senses, striving again to force upon herself the belief that, after all, it could not be so.
“No, no, no!” she cried. “This can’t be true. It mustn’t be. There’s a mistake somewhere. This simply must be all an illusion, a dream!
“If the whole world’s dead, how does it happen we’re alive? How do we know it’s dead? Can we see it all from here? Why, all we see is just a little segment of things. Perhaps if we could know the truth, look farther, and know—”
He shook his head.
“I guess you’ll find it’s real enough,” he answered, “no matter how far you look. But, just the same, it won’t do any harm to extend our radius of observation
“Come, let’s go on up to the top of the tower, up to the observation-platform. The quicker we know all the available facts the better. Now, if I only had a telescope—!”
He thought hard a moment, then turned and strode over to a heap of friable disintegration that lay where once his instrument case had stood, containing his surveying tools.
Down on his ragged knees he fell; his rotten shreds of clothing tore and ripped at every movement, like so much water-soaked paper.
A strange, hairy, dust-covered figure, he knelt there. Quickly he plunged his hands into the rubbish and began pawing it over and over with eager haste.
“Ah!” he cried with triumph. “Thank Heaven, brass and lenses haven’t crumbled yet!”
Up he stood again. In his hand the girl saw a peculiar telescope.
“My ‘level,’ see?” he exclaimed, holding it up to view. “The wooden tripod’s long since gone. The fixtures that held it on won’t bother me much.
“Neither will the spirit-glass on top. The main thing is that the telescope itself seems to be still intact. Now we’ll see.”
Speaking, he dusted off the eye-piece and the objective with a bit of rag from his coat-sleeve.
Beatrice noted that the brass tubes were all eaten and pitted with verdigris, but they still held firmly. And the lenses, when Stern had finished cleaning them, showed as bright and clear as ever.
“Come, now; come with me,” he bade.
Out through the doorway into the hall he made his way while the girl followed. As she went she gathered her wondrous veil of hair more closely about her.
In this universal disorganization, this wreck of all the world, how little the conventions counted!
Together, picking their way up the broken stairs, where now the rust-bitten steel showed through the corroded stone and cement in a thousand places, they cautiously climbed.
Here, spider-webs thickly shrouded the way, and had to be brushed down. There, still more bats bung and chippered in protest as the intruders passed.
A fluffy little white owl blinked at them from a dark niche; and, well toward the top of the climb, they flushed up a score of mud-swallows which had ensconced themselves comfortably along a broken balustrade.
At last, however, despite all unforeseen incidents of this sort, they reached the upper platform, nearly a thousand feet above the earth.
Out through the relics of the revolving door they crept, he leading, testing each foot of the way before the girl. They reached the narrow platform of red tiling that surrounded the tower.
Even here they saw with growing amazement that the hand of time and of this maddening mystery had laid its heavy imprint.
“Look!” he exclaimed, pointing. “What this all means we don’t know yet. How long it’s been we can’t tell. But to judge by the appearance up here, it’s even longer than I thought. See, the very tiles are cracked and crumbling.
“Tilework is usually considered highly recalcitrant—but this is gone. There’s grass growing in the dust that’s settled between the tiles. And—why, here’s a young oak that’s taken root and forced a dozen slabs out of place.”
“The winds and birds have carried seeds up here, and acorns,” she answered in an awed voice. “Think of the time that must have passed. Years and years.
“But tell me,” and her brow wrinkled with a sudden wonder, “tell me how we’ve ever lived so long? I can’t understand it.
“Not only have we escaped starvation, but we haven’t frozen to death in all these bitter winters. How can that have happened?”
“Let it all go as suspended animation till we learn the facts, if we ever do,” he replied, glancing about with wonder.
“You know, of course, how toads have been known to live embedded in rock for centuries? How fish, hard-frozen, have been brought to life again? Well—”
“But we are human beings.”
“I know. Certain unknown natural forces, however, might have made no more of us than of non-mammalian and less highly organized creatures.
“Don’t bother your head about these problems yet a while. On my word, we’ve got enough to do for the present without much caring about how or why.
“All we definitely know is that some very long, undetermined period of time has passed, leaving us still alive. The rest can wait.”
“How long a time do you judge it?” she anxiously inquired.
“Impossible to say at once. But it must have been something extraordinary—probably far longer than either of us suspect.
“See, for example, the attrition of everything up here exposed to the weather.” He pointed at the heavy stone railing. “See how that is wrecked, for instance.”
A whole segment, indeed, had fallen inward. Its debris lay in confusion, blocking all the southern side of the platform.
The bronze bars, which Stern well remembered—two at each corner, slanting downward and bracing a rail—had now wasted to mere pockmarked shells of metal.
Three had broken entirely and sagged wantonly awry with the displacement of the stone blocks, between which the vines and grasses had long been carrying on their destructive work.
“Look out!” Stern cautioned. “Don’t lean against any of those stones.” Firmly he held her back as she, eagerly inquisitive, started to advance toward the railing.
“Don’t go anywhere near the edge. It may all be rotten and undermined, for anything we know. Keep back here, close to the wall.”
Sharply he inspected it a moment.
“Facing stones are pretty well gone,” said he, “but, so far as I can see, the steel frame isn’t too bad. Putting everything together, I’ll probably be able before long to make some sort of calculation of the date. But for now we’ll have to call it ‘X,’ and let it go at that.”
“The year X!” she whispered under her breath. “Good Heavens, am I as old as that?”
He made no answer, but only drew her to him protectingly, while all about them the warm summer wind swept onward to the sea, out over the sparkling expanses of the bay—alone unchanged in all that universal wreckage.
In the breeze her heavy masses of hair stirred luringly. He felt its silken caress on his half-naked shoulder, and in his ears the blood began to pound with strange insistence.