Darkness and Dawn | Page 7

his thoughts.
To divert his wonderings and to ease a situation which oppressed him, he began adjusting
the "level" telescope to his eye.
With his back planted firmly against the tower, he studied a wide section of the dead and
buried world so very far below them. With astonishment he cried:
"It is true, Beatrice! Everything's swept clean away. Nothing left, nothing at all--no signs
of life!
"As far as I can reach with these lenses, universal ruin. We're all alone in this whole
world, just you and I--and everything belongs to us!"
"Everything--all ours?"
"Everything! Even the future--the future of the human race!"
Suddenly he felt her tremble at his side. Down at her he looked, a great new tenderness
possessing him. He saw that tears were forming in her eyes.
Beatrice pressed both hands to her face and bowed her head. Filled with strange emotions,
the man watched her for a moment.
Then in silence, realizing the uselessness of any words, knowing that in this monstrous
Ragnarok of all humanity no ordinary relations of life could bear either cogency or
meaning, he took her in his arms.
And there alone with her, far above the ruined world, high in the pure air of mid-heaven,
he comforted the girl with words till then unthought-of and unknown to him.

CHAPTER IV
THE CITY OF DEATH
Presently Beatrice grew calmer. For though grief and terror still weighed upon her soul,
she realized that this was no fit time to yield to any weakness--now when a thousand
things were pressing for accomplishment, if their own lives, too, were not presently to be
snuffed out in all this universal death.
"Come, come," said Stern reassuringly. "I want you, too, to get a complete idea of what
has happened. From now on you must know all, share all, with me." And, taking her by
the hand he led her along the crumbling and uncertain platform.

Together, very cautiously, they explored the three sides of the platform still unchoked by
ruins.
Out over the incredible mausoleum of civilization they peered. Now and again they
fortified their vision by recourse to the telescope.
Nowhere, as he had said, was any slightest sign of life to be discerned. Nowhere a thread
of smoke arose; nowhere a sound echoed upward.
Dead lay the city, between its rivers, whereon now no sail glinted in the sunlight, no tug
puffed vehemently with plumy jets of steam, no liner idled at anchor or nosed its slow
course out to sea.
The Jersey shore, the Palisades, the Bronx and Long Island all lay buried in dense forests
of conifers and oak, with only here and there some skeleton mockery of a steel structure
jutting through.
The islands in the harbor, too, were thickly overgrown. On Ellis, no sign of the immigrant
station remained. Castle William was quite gone. And with a gasp of dismay and pain,
Beatrice pointed out the fact that no longer Liberty held her bronze torch aloft.
Save for a black, misshapen mass protruding through the tree-tops, the huge gift of
France was no more.
Fringing the water-front, all the way round, the mournful remains of the docks and piers
lay in a mere sodden jumble of decay, with an occasional hulk sunk alongside.
Even over these wrecks of liners, vegetation was growing rank and green. All the wooden
ships, barges and schooners had utterly vanished.
The telescope showed only a stray, lolling mast of steel, here or yonder, thrusting up from
the desolation, like a mute appealing hand raised to a Heaven that responded not.
"See," remarked Stern, "up-town almost all the buildings seem to have crumbled in upon
themselves, or to have fallen outward into the streets. What an inconceivable tangle of
detritus those streets must be!
"And, do you notice the park hardly shows at all? Everything's so overgrown with trees
you can't tell where it begins or ends. Nature has her revenge at last, on man!"
"The universal claim, made real," said Beatrice. "Those rather clearer lines of green, I
suppose, must be the larger streets. See how the avenues stretch away and away, like
ribbons of green velvet?"
"Everywhere that roots can hold at all, Mother Nature has set up her flags again. Hark!
What's that?"
A moment they listened intently. Up to them, from very far, rose a wailing cry, tremulous,

long-drawn, formidable.
"Oh! Then there are people, after all?" faltered the girl, grasping Stern's arm.
He laughed.
"No, hardly!" answered he. "I see you don't know the wolf-cry. I didn't till I heard it in
the Hudson Bay country, last winter--that is, last winter, plus X. Not very pleasant, is it?"
"Wolves! Then--there are--"
"Why not? Probably all sorts of game on the island now. Why shouldn't there be? All in
Mother Nature's