“There!” cried Lieutenant Sibley, with an involuntary wave of his hand. “Behold the city of the dead, Louisville!—Louisville, once such a grand city, now a silent, slime-covered, submerged testimony of nature’s conquering power over man’s puny will.”
Cobb pressed his face against the glass and silently gazed upon the lifeless buildings and streets of the city. Even as they stood years ago, so stood many at that moment. Others were in ruins, with gaping walls and broken doors and windows, and all were covered with mud and slime and marine vegetation.
The streets were half-way up to the second stories, but the tops of the street-lamps could be discerned sticking out of the muddy sediment which had been deposited over everything.
Slowly the Tracer moved forward, and the whole expanse of the southeast side of this unfortunate, but once brilliant, city was presented to view.
What emotions filled that man’s breast, with his eyes glued, as if fascinated by some unknown power, upon the spot he had, in years long since past, visited, looked upon, and walked in! With a sickening feeling of utter sadness at his heart, he turned away.
“God’s ways are inscrutable,” he sighed. A tear glistened in his eye as he cried: “No more! Let us ascend!”
At 24 dial the Tracer was at her moorings in Pittsburgh, and Cobb, Rawolle, and Lyman took the Chicago Pneumatic for Washington.
As he lay in his berth in the sleeper, his mind reverted back to the days when he had met his friends in social evenings of pleasure; to his old friend in Duke’s Lane, and to the bright, lovely face of that man’s daughter. Ah! how he longed for but an hour with them—an hour of true friendship and love; how he craved to listen to but a moment’s innocent prattle of his girl-love. Alone among strangers, among a people far ahead of his time, he felt that he was looked upon as a curiosity, but not as one claiming sympathy and love as a relative or dear friend. Did the experiment come up to the ideal? Was he satisfied to die and live again? He asked these questions of himself. He meditated—reflected—and slept.