“But we colored people are different. We are the civilized peoples of the earth. Our civilization has taken the place of that of the white peoples some two thousand years ago.”
The truth became clear to Carl and Sana as they listened to the speaker’s words. The hypocrisy of nations, like that of individuals, ends with disaster.
Asking whether all these great changes had been wrought in a natural way, Carl was told “Not quite so. At the time when the Sahara, as it was then known, was changed from a desert into a flowering garden, there was, according to history, a great astronomical upheaval, destroying great cities, and killing millions of people. Ever since, the ‘great comet,’ which will soon be visible in the sky, has appeared daily. Then our colored people with the mixture of the French blood get excited. They cannot lose their fear.”
Sana smiled, saying, “After two thousand years they are still excited and afraid.”
In the days that followed Carl and Sana, in their wanderings about this strange country, were soon convinced of the truth of the things they had been told. Much as they would have liked to remain here and study the civilization and people about them, they desired to hasten to America. Of Sana’s homestead on the Gurara Oasis there was nothing to be seen. Ages ago all that was dear to Sana had been buried deep beneath the waves of the great inland sea.
So getting once more into the “Meteor” they set out for Carl’s beloved country.
America, too, had changed, Carl found to his great regret, when the “Meteor” alighted at the site of what was once the world’s greatest city. Gone were the towering buildings of New York, gone were its millions of people. In its place was naught but a great sandy plain, or better, a plateau, extending for miles in all directions, and unpeopled save for a few straggling groups of rude hut-like shelters.
In landing the “Meteor” had come to a stop at a point that Carl figured was approximately lower Broadway. Nearby some excavating work was being done by a group of white-bearded men, who at the sight of the airplane dropped their implements and came hurrying towards it. Upon questioning these men Carl learned that they were scientists who had come from the cities that lay in the distant West, to learn something about the civilization that had existed on the Atlantic coast in the days of the past.
To the best of their knowledge, they explained, some thousand or so years ago the entire coast had been devastated by great tidal waves, followed by terrible earthquakes causing untold destruction. Volcanic eruptions, too, had added to the havoc, burying the lands, for thousands of square miles, under millions of tons of lava and rock.
Leading him to the pit where Carl had first seen them, the excavators asked him to peer down the deep shaft they had dug. At the bottom, some two hundred feet below him, Carl saw the tower of the great Woolworth Building of old New York.