Here the effects of the explosion were very marked. A ghastly hole opened into the subcellar below; masses of fallen ceiling blocked the way; and every pane of glass in the shop-fronts had shattered down. Smoke had blackened everything. Ashes and dirt, ad infinitum, completed the dreary picture, seen there by the still insufficient light of morning.
But Stern cared nothing for all this. It even cheered him a trifle.
"In case of a mix-up," thought he, "there couldn't be a better place for ambushing these infernal cannibals--for mowing them down, wholesale--for sending them skyhooting to Tophet, in bunches!"
And with a grim smile, he worked his way cautiously toward Madison Forest and the pine-tree gate.
As he drew near, his care redoubled. His grip on the revolver-butt tightened.
"They mustn't see me--first!" said he to himself.
Into a littered wreck of an office at the right of the exit he silently crept. Here, he knew, the outer wall of the building was deeply fissured. He hoped he might be able to find some peep-hole where, unseen, he could peer out on the bestial mob.
He set his water-pail down, and on hands and knees, hardly breathing, taking infinite pains not to stir the loose rubbish on the floor, not even to crunch the fallen lumps of mortar, forward he crawled.
Yes, there was a glimmer of light through the crack in the wall. Stern silently wormed in between a corroded steel I-beam and a cracked granite block, about the edges of which the small green tendrils of a vine had laid their hold.
This way, then that, he craned his neck. And all at once, with a sharp breath, he grew rigid in horrified, eager attention.
"Great Lord!" he whispered. "What?"
Though, from the upper stories and by torch-light, he had already formed some notion of the Horde, he had in no wise been prepared for what he now was actually beholding through a screen of sumacs that grew along the wall outside.
"Why--why, this can't be real!" thought he. "It--must be some damned hallucination. Eh? Am I awake? What the deuce!"
Paling a little, his eyes staring, mouth agape, the engineer stayed there for a long minute unable to credit his own senses. For now he, he, the only white man living in the twenty-eighth century, was witnessing the strangest sight that ever a civilized being had looked upon in the whole history of the world.
No vision of DeQuincey, no drug-born dream of Poe could equal it for grisly fascination. Frankenstein, de Maupassant's "Horla," all the fantastic literary monsters of the past faded to tawdry, childish bogeys beside the actual observations of Stern, the engineer, the man of science and cold fact.