Darkness and Dawn
that this was no fit time to yield to any weakness--now when a thousand things were pressing for acc
a of what has happened. From now on you must know all, share all, with me." An
explored the three sides of the
ation they peered. Now and again they fortif
gn of life to be discerned. Nowhere a thread
d in the sunlight, no tug puffed vehemently with plumy jets of st
y buried in dense forests of conifers and oak, with only here and
grant station remained. Castle William was quite gone. And with a gasp of dismay and
rotruding through the tree-tops, t
ul remains of the docks and piers lay in a mere sodden
was growing rank and green. All the wooden sh
here or yonder, thrusting up from the desolation, like a
e crumbled in upon themselves, or to have fallen outward into the st
thing's so overgrown with trees you can't tell where it
arer lines of green, I suppose, must be the larger streets. See ho
t all, Mother Nature has set up h
them, from very far, rose a wailing c
, after all?" faltered the
lau
. I didn't till I heard it in the Hudson Bay country, last wi
Then--the
e island now. Why shouldn't there be? All
resent. Time enough to consider hunting later. Let's creep aroun
thern part of the platform, making their way as far as
lest the support break beneath them and hurl them d
e there used to be Broadway. Quite a respectable Forest
t shining through? You know them--the Park Row, the Singer, t
sight. Of the Brooklyn Bridge
uttermost desolation, beheld a dragging mass of wreckage that dro
Stern could quite plainly see, without the telescope, that the Williamsburg Bridge had "buckle
ruin!" thought the engineer. "Yet, even in thei
desire to rehabilitate all this wreckage, to set it right, t
wn powerlessness a bitt
to share somethi
u and--and I--are really like Macaulay's lone
rophets and poets? That 'All this mighty heart is lying still,'
shake his head; but fast
the sole survivors of the entire human race? That race for whose
losing chapter in the long, painful, glorious Book o
e truth and weigh it, he knew he must not analyze too closel
t she
ross the sky. Purple and gold and crimson lay
windows and sagging walls, its thousands of gaping vacancies, where wood and stone and brick had cr
ich alone did not repel or mystify these two beleaguered waifs, these chan
sunset over a world devoid of human life, for the
asses that marked the one-time course of Twenty-Third Street, the forest in Madison Square, and the
eir breath sounded strangely loud. Above them, on
ce the gi
ng over there!" said she
djusted it, and gazed minutely at thndreds of blocks had fallen into Broadway forming a vast
hole roof had caved in, crushing down the upper stories, orected at a certain sp
eighteenth floor!" cried she. "There, look?" And she
bling hands the telescope sank.
ny longer--I can't, possibly! The sight of that wr
d the platform to the doorway, then down the crumbling stairs and so
her shoulder, he bade her
eason this thing out together, let's try to solv
can't know yet a while, till I investig
the world. But we can find out--after we've made provision fo
a slate, then why we should have happened to survive whatever it was
s; he looked into her eyes as though to read the very soul of her, to ju
I get the proper data for this series of phe
anything that either of us has ever dreamed. It's not our place, now, to mo
nfidingly. And in the last declining rays of the sun that g