And every one of them looked lonely. Lonely and not quite understanding – like a dog that's been kicked out of a chair he thinks of as his own. Their windows gaping like dead eyes. No cheerful glow of light within them. Their colors dulled by the wash of seasons that had rolled over them.

This was worse, I told myself, than if we'd found the place all smashed to hell by bombs. Because, brutal as it is, one can understand a bombed city. And one can't understand, or feel comfortable in a city that's just been left behind to die.

And the people!

Thinking about them gave me the jitters. Were all the people like old Daniel Boone? We had seen how he and his family lived, and it wasn't pretty. People who had backed down the scale of progress. People who had forgotten the printed word, had twisted the old truths and the old history into screwy legends.

It was easy enough to understand how it had happened. Pull the economic props from under a civilization and there's hell to pay. First you have mad savagery and even madder destruction as class hatred flames unchecked. And when that hatred dies down after an orgy of destruction there is bewilderment, and then some more savagery and hatred born of bewilderment.

But, sink as low as he may, man always will climb again. It's the nature of the beast. He's an ornery cuss.

But man, apparently, hadn't climbed again. Civilization, as Herb and I knew it, had crashed all of three hundred years before – and man still was content to live in the shadow of his former greatness, not questioning the mute evidences of his mighty past, uninspired by the soaring blocks of stone that reared mountainous above him.