CHAPTER VII
THE OUTER WORLD
Before daybreak the engineer was up again, and active. Now thathe faced the light of morning, with a thousand difficult problemsclosing in on every hand, he put aside his softer moods, his visionsand desires, and--like the scientific man he was--addressed himself tothe urgent matters in hand.
"The girl's safe enough alone, here, for a while," thought he, lookingin upon her where she lay, calm as a child, folded within the clingingmasses of the tiger-skin.
"I must be out and away for two or three hours, at the very least. Ihope she'll sleep till I get back. If not--what then?"
He thought a moment; then, coming over to the charred remnants of lastnight's fire, chose a bit of burnt wood. With this he scrawled inlarge, rough letters on a fairly smooth stretch of the wall:
"Back soon. All O. K. Don't worry."
Then, turning, he set out on the long, painful descent again to theearth-level.
Garish now, and doubly terrible, since seen with more than doubleclearness by the graying dawn, the world-ruin seemed to him.
Strong of body and of nerve as he was, he could not help but shudderat the numberless traces of sudden and pitiless death which met hisgaze.
Everywhere lay those dust-heaps, with here or there a tooth, a ring, abit of jewelry showing--everywhere he saw them, all the way down thestairs, in every room and office he peered into, and in thetime-ravished confusion of the arcade.
But this was scarcely the time for reflections of any sort. Lifecalled, and labor, and duty; not mourning for the dead world, nor evenwonder or pity at the tragedy which had so mysteriously--befallen.
And as the man made his way over and through the universal wreckage,he took counsel with himself.
"First of all, water!" thought he. "We can't depend on the bottledsupply. Of course, there's the Hudson; but it's brackish, if notdownright salt. I've got to find some fresh and pure supply, close athand. That's the prime necessity of life.
"What with the canned stuff, and such game as I can kill, there'sbound to be food enough for a while. But a good water-supply we musthave, and at once!"
Yet, prudent rather for the sake of Beatrice than for his own, hedecided that he ought not to issue out, unarmed, into this new andsavage world, of which he had as yet no very definite knowledge. Andfor a while he searched hoping to find some weapon or other.
"I've got to have an ax, first of all," said he. "That's mans firstneed, in any wilderness. Where shall I find one?"
He thought a moment.
"Ah! In the basements!" exclaimed he. "Maybe I can locate anengine-room, a store-room, or something of that sort. There's sure tobe tools in a place like that." And, laying off the bear-skin, heprepared to explore the regions under the ground-level.
He used more than half an hour, through devious ways and hard labor,to make his way to the desired spot. The ancient stair-way, leadingdown, he could not find.
But by clambering down one of the elevator-shafts, digging toes andfingers into the crevices in the metal framework and the cracks in theconcrete, he managed at last to reach a vaulted sub-cellar, festoonedwith webs, damp, noisome and obscure.
Considerable light glimmered in from a broken sidewalk-grating above,and through a gaping, jagged hole near one end of the cellar, beneathwhich lay a badly-broken stone.
The engineer figured that this block had fallen from the tower andcome to rest only here; and this awoke him to a new sense ofever-present peril. At any moment of the night or day, he realized,some such mishap was imminent.
"Eternal vigilance!" he whispered to himself. Then, dismissing uselessfears, he set about the task in hand.
By the dim illumination from above, he was able to take cognizance ofthe musty-smelling place, which, on the whole, was in a better stateof repair than the arcade. The first cellar yielded nothing of valueto him, but, making his way through a low vaulted door, he chancedinto what must have been one of the smaller, auxiliary engine-rooms.
This, he found, contained a battery of four dynamos, a smallseepage-pump, and a crumbling marble switch-board with part of thewiring still comparatively intact.
At sight of all this valuable machinery scaled and pitted with rust,Stern's brows contracted with a feeling akin to pain. The engineerloved mechanism of all sorts; its care and use had been his life.
And now these mournful relics, strange as that may seem, affected himmore strongly than the little heaps of dust which marked the spotswhere human beings had fallen in sudden, inescapable death.
Yet even so, he had no time for musing.
"Tools!" cried he, peering about the dimwit vault. "Tools--I must havesome. Till I find tools, I'm helpless!"
Search as he might, he discovered no ax in the place, but in place ofit he unearthed a sledge-hammer. Though corroded, it was still quiteserviceable. Oddly enough, the oak handle was almost intact.
"Kyanized wood, probably," reflected he, as he laid the sledge to oneside and began delving into a bed of dust that had evidently been awork-bench. "Ah! And here's a chisel! A spanner, too! A heap of rustyold wire nails!"
Delightedly he examined these treasures.
"They're worth more to me," he exulted; "than all the gold betweenhere and what's left of San Francisco!"
He found nothing more of value in the litter. Everything else wasrusted beyond use. So, having convinced himself that nothing moreremained, he gathered up his finds and started back whence he hadcome.
After some quarter-hour of hard labor, he managed to transporteverything up into the arcade.
"Now for a glimpse of the outer world!" quoth he.
Gripping the sledge well in hand, he made his way through the confusednexus of ruin. Disguised as everything now was, fallen and disjointed,murdering, blighted by age incalculable, still the man recognized manyfamiliar features.
Here, he recalled, the telephone-booths had been; there theinformation desk. Yonder, again, he remembered the little curvedcounter where once upon a time a man in uniform had sold tickets tosuch as had wanted to visit the tower.
Counter now was dust; ticket-man only a crumble of fine, grayishpowder. Stern shivered slightly, and pressed on.
As he approached the outer air, he noticed that many a grassy tuft andcreeping vine had rooted in the pavement of the arcade, up-prying themarble slabs and cracking the once magnificent floor.
The doorway itself was almost choked by a tremendous Norway pine whichhad struck root close to the building, and now insolently blocked thatway where, other-time many thousand men and women every day had comeand gone.
But Stern clambered out past this obstacle, testing the floor with hissledge, as he went, lest he fall through an unseen weak spots into thedepths of coal-cellars below. And presently he reached the outer air,unharmed.
"But--but, the sidewalk?" cried he, amazed. "The street--the Square?Where are they?" And in astonishment he stopped, staring.
The view from the tower, though it had told him something of thechanges wrought, had given him no adequate conception of theirmagnitude.
He had expected some remains of human life to show upon the earth,some semblance of the metropolis to remain in the street. But no,nothing was there; nothing at all on the ground to show that he was inthe heart of a city.
He could, indeed, catch glimpses of a building here or there. Throughthe tangled thickets that grew close up to the age-worn walls of theMetropolitan, he could make out a few bits of tottering constructionon the south side of what had been Twenty-Third Street.
But of the street itself, no trace remained--no pavement, no sidewalk,no curb. And even so near and so conspicuous an object as the wreck ofthe Flatiron was now entirely concealed by the dense forest.
Soil had formed thickly over all the surface. Huge oaks and pinesflourished there as confidently as though in the heart of the Maineforest, crowding ash and beech for room.
Under the man's feet, even as he stood close by the building--whichwas thickly overgrown with ivy
and with ferns and bushes rooted in thecrannies--the pine-needles bent in deep, pungent beds.
Birch, maple, poplar and all the natives of the American woodsshouldered each other lustily. By the state of the fresh young leaves,just bursting their sheaths, Stern knew the season was mid-May.
Through the wind-swayed branches, little flickering patches of morningsunlight met his gaze, as they played and quivered on the forest mossor over the sere pine-spills.
Even upon the huge, squared stones which here and there lay indisorder, and which Stern knew must have fallen from the tower, themoss grew very thick; and more than one such block had been rent byfrost and growing things.
"How long has it been, great Heavens! How long?" cried the engineer, asudden fear creeping into his heart. For this, the reasserteddominance of nature, bore in on him with more appalling force thananything he had yet seen.
About him he looked, trying to get his bearings in that strangemilieu.
"Why," said he, quite slowly, "it's--it's just as though some cosmicjester, all-powerful, had scooped up the fragments of a ruined cityand tossed them pell-mell into the core of the Adirondacks! It'shorrible--ghastly--incredible!"
Dazed and awed, he stood as in a dream, a strange figure with his maneof hair, his flaming, trailing beard, his rags (for he had left thebear-skin in the arcade), his muscular arm, knotted as he held thesledge over his shoulder.
Well might he have been a savage of old times; one of the earlybarbarians of Britain, perhaps, peering in wonder at the ruins of somedeserted Roman camp.
The chatter of a squirrel high up somewhere in the branches of an oak,recalled him to his wits. Down came spiralling a few bits of bark andacorn-shell, quite in the old familiar way.
Farther off among the woods, a robin's throaty morning notes driftedto him on the odorous breeze. A wren, surprisingly tame, chipperedbusily. It hopped about, not ten feet from him, entirely fearless.
Stern realized that it was now seeing a man for the first time in itslife, and that it had no fear. His bushy brows contracted as hewatched the little brown body jumping from twig to twig in the pineabove him.
A deep, full breath he drew. Higher, still higher he raised his head.Far through the leafy screen he saw the overbending arch of sky intiny patches of turquoise.
"The same old world, after all--the same, in spite ofeverything--thank God!" he whispered, his very tone a prayer ofthanks.
And suddenly, though why he could not have told, the grim engineer'seyes grew wet with tears that ran, unheeded, down his heavy-beardedcheeks.