“I, Pennyroyal, resolved to discover the truth! Back in the spring of the year ’89 I set out to see what I could find. Myself and four companions, aboard my airship the Allan Quatermain. We crossed the North Atlantic, and soon touched down upon the shores of America, near a place that the ancient charts call New York. It was as dead as we’d been promised; a series of vast craters, their sides fused by the intense heat of that millennia-old conflict into the substance known as Blast Glass.

“We took off again and flew west, into the very heart of the Dead Continent, and that was when disaster struck. Storms of an almost supernatural ferocity wrecked my poor Allan Quatermain in the midst of an immense, polluted wilderness. Three of my companions perished in the smash, the fourth died a few days later, poisoned by some water from a pool which looked clear, but which must have been tainted with some ghastly Old-Tech chemical — he turned blue, and gave off a scent of old socks.

“Alone, I staggered on into the north, crossing the Plain of Craters where once the legendary cities of Chicago and Milwaukee stood. I had given up all thought of finding my green America. My only hope now was that I might reach the edge of the Ice Wastes and be rescued by some wandering band of Snowmads.

“At last, even that hope faded. Weak from exhaustion and lack of water, I lay down in a dry valley between great black jagged mountains. In despair I cried out, ‘Is this really to be the end of Nimrod Pennyroyal?’ and the stones seemed to answer, ‘Yup.’ All hope was gone, d’you see? I commended my soul to the Goddess of Death and shut my eyes, expecting to open them again only as a ghost in the Sunless Country. The next thing I knew I was wrapped in furs and laid in the bottom of a canoe, and some charming young people were paddling me north.

“These were not fellow explorers from the Hunting Ground, as I at first supposed. They were natives! Yes, there is a tribe of people actually living in the northernmost parts of that Dead Continent! Until then, I had accepted the traditional story — the story which I’m sure you were told by your Guild of Historians — that the few poor souls who survived the fall of America fled north on to the ice and mingled with the Inuit, producing the Snowmad race we know today.