Page 436 (1/1)

Here and there they even stumbled on a distorted, half-consumed body--a hideous reminder of the vanquished eneainst the whole-man, with inevitable annihilation as the only possible result

The distorted attitudes of soly carcasses told with eloquence the terrified, vain flight of the Horde before the all-consuuish of their extinction

But Allan only grunted or sht of the horrible little bodies Pity he felt no more than for a crushed and hideous copperhead

The country had been swept clean by the fire-broo creature reht be, and perhaps hares and foxes, woodchucks, groundhogs and a few such animals that by chance had taken earth; but even of these there was no trace Certainly all larger breeds had been destroyed

Where paradise-birds, -birds darted with a whir of gauzy wings, serpents writhed, deer browsed,from the liana-festooned fern-trees, now all was silence, charred ashes, dust--the universal, blank awfulness of death

Naked and ugly the country stretched away, away to its black horizon, ridge after ridge of rolling land stubbled with sparse, limbless trunks and carpeted with cinders

A dead world truly, it seereen beauty of the territory south of the New Hope, a region Stern still could h his binoculars

By night, after having eaten dinner beside a turbid, brackish pool, they had ht scornfully of the distance In his Pauillac he would have covered it easily in asreh the choking desolation of the burned world

They caht, and cast their lines, but took nothing Stern gave this ht be afish elsewhere

Even the discovery of three or four dead perch, floating belly up, round and round in an eddy, gave him no clue to the total destruction of all life He did not understand even yet that the terrific conflagration, far more stupendous than any ever known in the old days, had even heated the streams and killed there the very fish theun to creep over him--not yet a definite presenti that the odds against hireat