Darkness and Dawn
Page 20
CHAPTER XX
THE CURIOSITY OF EVE
At him the girl peered eagerly, a second, as though to makequite sure he was not hurt in any way, to satisfy herself that he wassafe and sound.
Then with a little gasp of relief, she ran to him. Her sandaled feetlightly disturbed the rubbish on the floor; dust rose. Stern checkedher with an upraised hand.
"Back! Back! Go back, quick!" he formed the words of command on histrembling lips. The idea of this girl's close proximity to thebeast-horde terrified him, for the moment. "Back! What on earth areyou _here_ for?"
"I--I woke up. I found you gone!" she whispered.
"Yes, but didn't you read my letter? _This_ is no place for you!"
"I had to come! How could I stay up there, alone, when you--were--oh!maybe in danger--maybe in need of me?"
"Come!" he commanded, in his perturbation heedless of the look shegave him. He took her hand. "Come, we must get out of this! It'stoo--too near the--"
"The _what?_ What _is_ it, Allan? Tell me, have you seen them? Do youknow?"
Even excited as the engineer was, he realized that for the first timethe girl had called him by his Christian name. Not even the periloussituation could stifle the thrill that ran through him at the sound ofit. But all he answered was:
"No, I don't know _what_ to call them. Have no idea, as yet. I've seenthem, yes; but what they are, Heaven knows--maybe!"
"Let me see, too!" she pleaded eagerly. "Is it through that crack inthe wall? Is that the place to look?"
She moved toward it, her face blanched with excitement, eyes shining,lips parted. But Stern held her back. By the shoulder he took her.
"No, no, little girl!" he whispered. "You--you mustn't! Really must_not_, you know. It's too awful!"
Up at him she looked, knowing not what to think or say for a moment.Their eyes met, there in that wrecked and riven place, lighted by thedull, misty, morning gray. Then Stern spoke, for in her gaze abodequestions unnumbered.
"I'd much rather you wouldn't look out at them, not just yet," saidhe, speaking very low, fearful lest the murmur of his voice mightpenetrate the wall. "Just what they are, frankly, there's no telling."
"You mean--?"
"Come back into the arcade, where we'll be safer from discovery, andwe can talk. Not here. Come!"
She obeyed. Together they retreated to the inner court.
"You see," he commented, nodding at the empty water-pail, "I haven'tbeen to the spring yet. Not very likely to get there for a while,either, unless--well, unless something pretty radical happens. I thinkthese chaps have settled down for a good long stay in their happyhunting-ground, after the fight and the big feast. It's sort of anotion I've got, that this place, here, is some ancient, ceremonialground of theirs."
"You mean, on account of the tower?"
He nodded.
"Yes, if they've got any religious ideas at all, or rathersuperstitions, such would very likely center round the mostconspicuous object in their world. Probably the spring is a regularvoodoo hangout. The row, last night, must have been a sort of periodicargument to see who was going to run the show."
"But," exclaimed the girl, in alarm--"but if they _do_ stay a while,what about us? We simply must have water!"
"True enough. And, inasmuch as we can't drink brine and don't knowwhere there's any other spring, it looks as though we'd either have tomake up to these fellows or wade into them, doesn't it? But we'll getwater safe enough, never fear. Just now, for the immediate present, Iwant to get my bearings a little, before going to work. _They_ seem tobe resting up, a bit, after their pleasant little soiree. Now, ifthey'd only all go to sleep, it'd be a walk-over!"
The girl looked at him, very seriously.
"You mustn't go out there alone, whatever happens!" she exclaimed. "Ijust won't let you! But tell me," she questioned again, "how much haveyou really found out about them--whatever they are."
"Not much. They seem to be part of a nomadic race of half-humanthings, that's about all I can tell as yet. Perhaps all the white andyellow peoples perished utterly in the cataclysm, leaving only a fewscattered blacks. You know blacks _are_ immune to severalgerm-infections that destroy other races."
"Yes. And you mean--?"
"It's quite possible these fellows are the far-distant and degeneratesurvivors of that other time."
"So the whole world may have gone to pieces the way Liberia and Haitiand Santo Domingo once did, when white rule ceased?"
"Yes, only a million times more so. I see you know your history! _If_my hypothesis is correct, and only a few thousand blacks escaped, youcan easily imagine what must have happened."
"For a while, maybe fifty or a hundred years, they may have kept somesort of dwindling civilization. Probably the English language for awhile continued, in ever more and more corrupt forms. There may havebeen some pretense of maintaining the school system, railroads,steamship lines, newspapers and churches, banks and all the rest ofthat wonderfully complex system we once knew. But after a while--"
"Yes? What _then?_"
"Why, the whole false shell crumbled, that's all. It must have!History shows it. It didn't take a hundred years after ToussaintL'Ouverture and Dessalines, in Haiti, for the blacks to shuck offFrench civilization and go back to grass huts and human sacrifice--tomake another little Central Africa out of it, in the backwoodsdistricts, at any rate. And _we_--have had a thousand, Beatrice, sincethe white man died!"
She thought a moment, and shook her head.
"What a story," she murmured, "what an incredible, horriblyfascinating story that would make, if it could ever be known, orwritten! Think of the ebb-tide of everything! Railroads abandoned andfalling to pieces, cities crumbling, ships no longer sailing, languageand arts and letters forgotten, agriculture shrinking back to a fewpatches of corn and potatoes, and then to nothing at all, everythingchanging, dying, stopping--and the ever-increasing yet degeneratingpeople leaving the city ruins, which they could not rebuild--taking tothe fields, the forests, the mountains--going down, down, back towardthe primeval state, down through barbarism, through savagery,to--what?"
"To what we see!" answered the engineer, bitterly. "To animals,retaining by ghastly mockery some use of fire and of tools. All this,according to _one_ theory."
"Is there another?" she asked eagerly.
"Yes, and I wish we had the shade of Darwin, of Haeckel or of Cloddhere with us to help us work it out!"
"How do you imagine it?"
"Why, like this. Maybe, after all, even the entire black race wasswept out along with the others, too. Perhaps you and I were reallythe only two human beings left alive in the world."
"Yes, but in that case, how--?"
"How came _they_ here? Listen! May they not be the product of someentirely different process of development? May not some animal stock,under changed environment, have easily evolved them? May not someother semi-human or near-human race be now in process of arising, hereon earth, eventually to conquer and subdue it all again?"
For a moment she made no answer. Her breath came a little quickly asshe tried to grasp the full significance of this tremendous concept.
"In a million years, or so," the engineer continued, "may not thedescendants of these things once more be men, or something very likethem? In other words, aren't we possibly witnessing the recreation ofthe human type? Aren't _these_ the real pithecanthropi erecti,rather than the brown-skinned, reddish-haired creatures of thebiological text-books? There's our problem!"
She made no answer, but a sudden overmastering curiosity leaped intoher eyes.
"Let me see them for myself! I must! I will!"
And before he could detain her, the girl had started back into theroom whence they had come.
"No, no! No, Beatrice!" he whispered, but she paid no heed to him.Across the littered floor she made her way. And by the time Sterncould reach her side, she had set her face to the long, crumblingcrack in the wall and with a burning eagerness was peering out intothe forest.
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