"We'd best be getting back up the stairs again," said he. And so they started.
"Are you going to leave that fire burning?" asked the girl, as they passed the middle of the arcade.
"Yes. It can't do any harm. Nothing to catch here; only old metal and cement. Besides, it would take too much time and labor to put it out."
Thus they abandoned the gruesome place and began the long, exhausting climb.
It must have taken them an hour and a half at least to reach their eerie. Both found their strength taxed to the utmost.
Before they were much more than halfway up, the ultimate drop of alcohol had been burned.
The last few hundred feet had to be made by slow, laborious feeling, aided only by such dim reflections of the gibbous moon as glimmered through a window, cobweb-hung, or through some break in the walls.
At length, however--for all things have an end--breathless and spent, they found their refuge. And soon after that, clad in their savage robes, they supped.
Allan Stern, consulting engineer, and Beatrice Kendrick, stenographer, now king and queen of the whole wide world domain (as they feared), sat together by a little blaze of punky wood fragments that flickered on the eroded floor.
They ate with their fingers and drank out of the bottles, sans apology. Strange were their speculations, their wonderings, their plans--now discussed specifically, now half-voiced by a mere word that thrilled them both with sudden, poignant emotion.
An so an hour passed, and the night deepened toward the birth of another day. The fire burned low and died, for they had little to replenish it with.
Down sank the moon, her pale light dimming as she went, her faint illumination wanly creeping across the disordered, wrack-strewn floor.
And at length Stern, in the outer office, Beatrice in the other, they wrapped themselves within their furs and laid them down to sleep.
Despite the age-long trance from which they both had but so recently emerged, a strange lassitude weighed on them.
Yet long after Beatrice had lost herself in dreams, Stern lay and thought strange thoughts, yearning and eager thoughts, there in the impenetrable gloom.
CHAPTER VII
THE OUTER WORLD
Table of Contents Before daybreak the engineer was up again, and active. Now that he faced the light of morning, with a thousand difficult problems closing in on every hand, he put aside his softer moods, his visions and desires, and--like the scientific man he was--addressed himself to the urgent matters in hand.
"The girl's safe enough alone, here, for a while," thought he, looking in upon her where she lay, calm as a child, folded within the clinging masses of the tiger-skin.
"I must be out and away for two or three hours, at the very least. I hope she'll sleep till I get back. If not--what then?"
He thought a moment; then, coming over to the charred remnants of last night's fire, chose a bit of burnt wood. With this he scrawled in large, 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 the earth-level.
Garish now, and doubly terrible, since seen with more than double clearness by the graying dawn, the world-ruin seemed to him.
Strong of body and of nerve as he was, he could not help but shudder at the numberless traces of sudden and pitiless death which met his gaze.
Everywhere lay those dust-heaps, with here or there a tooth, a ring, a bit of jewelry showing--everywhere he saw them, all the way down the stairs, in every room and office he peered into, and in the time-ravished confusion of the arcade.
But this was scarcely the time for reflections of any sort. Life called, and labor, and duty; not mourning for the dead world, nor even wonder 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 bottled supply. Of course, there's the Hudson; but it's brackish, if not downright salt. I've got to find some fresh and pure supply, close at hand. That's the prime necessity of life.
"What with the canned stuff, and such game as I can kill, there's bound to be food enough for a while. But a good water-supply we must have, and at once!"
Yet, prudent rather for the sake of Beatrice than for his own, he decided that he ought not to issue out, unarmed, into this new and savage world, of which he had as yet no very definite knowledge. And for 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 first need, in any wilderness. Where shall I find one?"
He thought a moment.
"Ah! In the basements!" exclaimed he. "Maybe I can locate an engine-room, a store-room, or something of that sort. There's sure to be tools in a place like that." And, laying off the bear-skin, he prepared 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, leading down, he could not find.
But by clambering down one of the elevator-shafts, digging toes and fingers into the crevices in the metal framework and the cracks in the concrete, he managed at last to reach a vaulted sub-cellar, festooned with 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, beneath which lay a badly-broken stone.
The engineer figured that this block had fallen from the tower and come to rest only here; and this awoke him to a new sense of ever-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 useless fears, he set about the task in hand.
By the dim illumination from above, he was able to take cognizance of the musty-smelling place, which, on the whole, was in a better state of repair than the arcade. The first cellar yielded nothing of value to him, but, making his way through a low vaulted door, he chanced into what must have been one of the smaller, auxiliary engine-rooms.
This, he found, contained a battery of four dynamos, a small seepage-pump, and a crumbling marble switch-board with part of the wiring 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 engineer loved mechanism of all sorts; its care and use had been his life.
And now these mournful relics, strange as that may seem, affected him more strongly than the little heaps of dust which marked the spots where 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 have some. Till I find tools, I'm helpless!"
Search as he might, he discovered no ax in the place, but in place of it he unearthed a sledge-hammer. Though corroded, it was still quite serviceable. Oddly enough, the oak handle was almost intact.
"Kyanized wood, probably," reflected he, as he laid the sledge to one side and began delving into a bed of dust that had evidently been a work-bench. "Ah! And here's a chisel! A spanner, too! A heap of rusty old wire nails!"
Delightedly he examined these treasures.
"They're worth more to me," he exulted; "than all the gold between here and what's left of San Francisco!"
He found nothing more of value in the litter. Everything else was rusted beyond use. So, having convinced himself that nothing more remained, he gathered up his finds and started back whence he had come.
After some quarter-hour of hard labor, he managed to transport everything 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 confused nexus of ruin. Disguised as everything now was, fallen and disjointed, murdering, blighted by age incalculable, still the man recognized many familiar features.
Here, he recalled, the telephone-booths had been; there the information desk. Yonder, again, he remembered the little curved counter where once upon a time a man in uniform had sold tickets to such as had wanted to visit the tower.
Counter now was dust; ticket-man only a crumble of fine, grayish powder. Stern shivered slightly, and pressed on.
As he approached the outer air, he noticed that many a grassy tuft and creeping vine had rooted in the pavement of the arcade, up-prying the marble slabs and cracking the once magnificent floor.
The doorway itself was almost choked by a tremendous Norway pine which had struck root close to the building, and now insolently blocked that way where, other-time many thousand men and women every day had come and gone.
But Stern clambered out past this obstacle, testing the floor with his sledge, as he went, lest he fall through an unseen weak spots into the depths 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 the changes wrought, had given him no adequate conception of their magnitude.
He had expected some remains of human life to show upon the earth, some semblance of the metropolis...
