For a long time he just looked and turned, and turned and looked. Everything else—emotions, thought—was subordinated to the act of seeing.
Up here it was still pretty light. And there were no hills to shut out the view. It stretched, snow-streaked, lightless, lifeless, achingly drear, to black horizons in three directions and a distant glittering ice-wall in the fourth.
The only suggestion of habitation was a thin pencil of smoke rising some distance across the plateau he faced.
For as long as he could, he pretended not to recognize the ruins sparsely dotting the landscape—vast mountainous stumps of structures, buckled and tortured things, blackened and ice-streaked, surrounded by strange formations of rock that suggested lava ridges, as if the very ground had melted and churned and boiled when those ruins were made.
A ruined world, from which the last rays of a setting sun, piercing for a moment the smoky ruins, struck dismal yellow highlights.
But recognition could only be held at bay for a few minutes. His guess about the ravine had been correct. That snow-shrouded, mile-long mound ahead of him was the grave of the Opal Cross. That dark monolith far to the left was the stump of the Gray H. Those two lopped towers, crazily buckled and leaning toward each other as if for support, were the Gray Twins. That split and jagged mass the other side of the ravine, black against the encroaching ice, up-thrust like the hand of a buried man, was the Rusty T.
It could hardly be World I, no matter after what catastrophe or lapse of years. For there was no sign, not even a suggestive hump, of the Blue Lorraine, the Mauve Z, or the Myrtle Y. Nor World II, for the Black Star's ruins would have bulked monstrously on the immediate left.
He looked at his hands.
They were thickened and calloused, ridged and darkened by scars of wounds and frostbite, the nails grained and uneven. And yet they were Thorn's hands.