Meanwhile, they had crossed the bridge into the city now known as "Sinnaty." The bridge carried them to the heart of the city; still it was with the utmost difficulty Duane—who had known Cincinnati—oriented himself.
It was as if a Twentieth Century New Yorker suddenly should find himself treading the muddy footpaths of New Amsterdam. The geography was the same, but the street pattern was so completely altered as to be practically unrecognizable. Where had been rows of smart shops and office buildings, there now ranged clusters of tumbledown shacks, shanties so squalid as to be mere pig-stys.
Gone were the fine asphalt avenues; age had crumbled them to dust; rain and snow had dissolved this dust, the feet of careless generations had turned the roadways to a quagmire of muck. Animals—cats, dogs, swine, an occasional horse or cow—roamed the streets unmolested, cropping the sparse grass by the roadsides or rooting through the garbage that befouled the air.
Two witnesses remained that this had once been Ohio's second largest city. Still intact was that great, paved intersection which had been Fountain Square ... and beside it, heart-stirringly beautiful in this scene of desolation and squalor, still stood proudly erect the mighty spire of Carew Tower. It was toward this building the Daans herded their prisoners.
The mighty spire of Carew Tower still stood proudly erect amid the ruins of Cincinnati.
A few humans, both men and women, were on the streets. But these slunk along in the shadows of the dilapidated houses, and when they glimpsed the Daans, scurried furtively, hastily, into the nearest shelter. Steve Duane's hands clenched at his sides to see this evidence of mankind's abject peonage, and in that moment he vowed that, though it cost him his life, he must do something!—to resurrect the glory which had once been Man's, and the pride which had once been America's!
But if the Overlords of Daan let their subjects live like beasts, they maintained a high standard of existence for themselves. The "Nedlunplaza" was, if anything, an even more gorgeous building than it had been in the days when its great lobby entertained visitors from forty-eight states, a hundred nations.