rring mechanical accuracy upon its mission of
annihilation.

Then I seemed to float over vast distances of that sunset-tinted land,
and saw great craters in the fields, and villages shot to ribbons, and
farms abandoned; and the wild dogs fought for the wild cattle; and
thistles grew deep on acres where wheat had been planted, and weeds
sprouted thickly in the orchards, and blight and mildew competed for the
crops. But though here and there I could see a dugout, with traces of
fire and abandoned tools flung about at random, nowhere in all that
dismal world did I observe a living man.

After a time I returned to a place near the ruined city by the two
rivers; and in the rocky palisades above one of the streams, I made out
some small circular holes barely large enough to admit a man. And, borne
onward by some impulse of curiosity and despair, I entered one of these
holes, and went downward, far downward into the dim recesses. And now
for the first time, at a depth of hundreds of yards, I did at last
encounter living men. My first thought was that I had gone back to the
day of the cave-man, for a cave-like hollow had been scooped out in the
solid rock. It was true that the few hundreds of people huddled together
there had the dress and looks of moderns; it was true, also, that the
gloom was lighted for them by electric bulbs, and that electric
radiators kept them warm; yet Dante himself, in painting the ninth
circle of his Inferno, could not have imagined a drearier and more
despondent group than these that slouched and drooped and muttered in
that cavernous recess, seated with their heads fallen low upon their
knees, or moodily pacing back and forth like captives who can hope for
no escape. "Here at least we will be safe from the sky marauders," I
heard one of them muttering. Yet I could not help wondering what the
mere safety of the body could mean when all the glories of man's
civilization were annihilated.

II

There came a whirring in my head, and another blank interval; and when I
regained my senses I knew that another period of time had passed,
possibly months or even years. I stood on the palisade above the river,
near the entrance of the caves; and the sun was bright above me; but
there was no brightness in the men and women that trailed out of a small
circular hole in the ground. Drab as dock-rats, and pasty pale of
countenance as hospital inmates, and with bent backs and dirty, tattered
clothes and a mouse