Darkness and Dawn | Page 8

stock-in-trade, you know.
"But come, come, don't let that worry you. We're safe, for the present. Time enough to
consider hunting later. Let's creep around here to the other side of the tower, and see what
we can see."
Silently she acquiesced. Together they reached the southern part of the platform, making
their way as far as the jumbled rocks of the fallen railing would permit.
Very carefully they progressed, fearful every moment lest the support break beneath them
and hurl them down along the sloping side of the pinnacle to death.
"Look!" bade Stern, pointing. "That very long green line there used to be Broadway.
Quite a respectable Forest of Arden now, isn't it?" He swept his hand far outward.
"See those steel cages, those tiny, far-off ones with daylight shining through? You know
them--the Park Row, the Singer, the Woolworth and all the rest. And the bridges, look at
those!"
She shivered at the desolate sight. Of the Brooklyn Bridge only the towers were visible.
The watchers, two isolated castaways on their island in the sea of uttermost desolation,
beheld a dragging mass of wreckage that drooped from these towers on either shore,
down to the sparkling flood.
The other bridges, newer and stronger far, still remained standing. But even from that
distance Stern could quite plainly see, without the telescope, that the Williamsburg
Bridge had "buckled" downward and that the farther span of the Blackwell's Island
Bridge was in ruinous disrepair.
"How horrible, how ghastly is all this waste and ruin!" thought the engineer. "Yet, even
in their overthrow, how wonderful are the works of man!"
A vast wonder seized him as he stood there gazing; a fierce desire to rehabilitate all this
wreckage, to set it right, to start the wheels of the world-machinery running once more.
At the thought of his own powerlessness a bitter smile curled his lips.

Beatrice seemed to share something of his wonder.
"Can it be possible," whispered she, "that you and--and I--are really like Macaulay's lone
watcher of the world-wreck on London Bridge?"
"That we are actually seeing the thing so often dreamed of by prophets and poets? That
'All this mighty heart is lying still,' at last--forever? The heart of the world, never to beat
again?"
He made no answer, save to shake his head; but fast his thoughts were running.
So then, could he and Beatrice, just they two, be in stern reality the sole survivors of the
entire human race? That race for whose material welfare he had, once on a time, done
such tremendous work?
Could they be destined, he and she, to witness the closing chapter in the long, painful,
glorious Book of Evolution? Slightly he shivered and glanced round.
Till he could adjust his reason to the facts, could learn the truth and weigh it, he knew he
must not analyze too closely; he felt he must try not to think. For that way lay madness!
Far out she gazed.
The sun, declining, shot a broad glory all across the sky. Purple and gold and crimson lay
the light-bands over the breast of the Hudson.
Dark blue the shadows streamed across the ruined city with its crowding forests, its
blank-staring windows and sagging walls, its thousands of gaping vacancies, where wood
and stone and brick had crumbled down--the city where once the tides of human life had
ebbed and flowed, roaring resistlessly.
High overhead drifted a few rosy clouds, part of that changeless nature which alone did
not repel or mystify these two beleaguered waifs, these chance survivors, this man, this
woman, left alone together by the hand of fate.
They were dazed, fascinated by the splendor of that sunset over a world devoid of human
life, for the moment giving up all efforts to judge or understand.
Stern and his mate peered closer, down at the interwoven jungles of Union Square, the
leafy frond-masses that marked the one-time course of Twenty-Third Street, the forest in
Madison Square, and the truncated column of the tower where no longer Diana turned her
huntress bow to every varying breeze.
They heard their own hearts beat. The intake of their breath sounded strangely loud.
Above them, on a broken cornice, some resting swallows twittered.
All at once the girl spoke.

"See the Flatiron Building over there!" said she. "What a hideous wreck!"
From Stern she took the telescope, adjusted it, and gazed minutely at the shattered pile of
stone and metal.
Blotched as with leprosy stood the walls, whence many hundreds of blocks had fallen
into Broadway forming a vast moraine that for some distance choked that thoroughfare.
In numberless places the steel frame peered through. The whole roof had caved in,
crushing down the upper stories, of which only a few sparse upstanding metal beams
remained.
The girl's