witnessed a battle between two half-crazed, ravenous
bands, with murder, and cannibalism, and horrors too grisly to report. I
observed brave men resolutely trying to till the soil, whose productive
powers had been ruined by a poison spray from the sky; and I noted some
who, though the fields remained fertile enough, had not the seed to
plant; and others who had not the tools with which to plow and reap. And
some who, with great labor, managed to produce enough for three or four
mouths, had twenty or thirty to feed; and where the three or four might
have lived, the twenty or thirty perished.

Then, with a great sadness, I knew that man, having become civilized,
cannot make himself into a savage again. He has come to depend upon
science for his sustenance, and when he himself has destroyed the means
of employing that science, he is as a babe without milk. And it is not
necessary to destroy all men in order to exterminate mankind; one need
only take from him the prop of his mechanical inventions.

III

Again there came a blankness, and I passed over a stretch of time,
perhaps over years or even decades. And I had wandered far in space, to
an island somewhere on a sunny sea; and there once more I heard the
sound of voices. And somehow, through some deeper sense, I knew that
these were the voices of the only men left anywhere on the whole wide
planet. And I looked down on them, and saw that they were but few, no
more than a dozen men and women in all, with three or four children
among them. But their faces, unlike those which I had seen before, were
not haggard and seamed, nor avid like those of hunting beasts, nor
distorted by fury or famine. Their brows were broad and noble, and their
eyes shone with the sweetness of great thoughts, and their smiles were
as unuttered music; and when they glanced at me with their clear, level
gaze, I knew that they were such beings as poets had pictured as
dwellers in a far tomorrow. And I did not feel sad, though I could not
forget that they were the only things in human form that one could find
on all earth's shores, and though I knew that they were too few to
perpetuate their kind for long. Somehow I felt some vast benevolent
spirit in control, that these most perfect specimens of our race should
endure when all the wreckers had vanished.

As I watched, I saw the people all turning their eyes to an eastern
mountain, whose summit still trailed the golden of the dawn-clouds. And
from