"Where is it? I never heard of such a thing. It sounds like Herculaneum or some of those Assyrian cities where they are always digging up statues and tablets and things."
"But this isn't a buried town. It's a real town, built perhaps twenty or thirty years ago; and it's located out in northern Indiana. And a perfectly nice little town, with brick stores and a couple of paved streets and other advantages. Everything—except inhabitants. No one lives there."
"Why not? Is this really true?"
"True as gospel. I saw it myself. I walked through the deserted streets. And a rather uncanny feeling it gave me, too."
"Was it unhealthy? Why did the people leave?"
"I haven't the vaguest idea," said Smith; and as he answered he raised his arm to point eastward along the street they had that moment reached. Following the direction in which he was pointing, Helen saw a thin line of smoke rising feebly from a pile of débris upon the ground. Near by were similar piles, sullenly smoldering.
"There's where they stopped it," said Smith.
They walked quickly along until they came to the very corner on which the last ebbing wave of the sea of fire had turned. This corner was at the intersection of Shawmut Avenue with the railroad's right of way. Over the tracks at this point was a raised steel bridge, and to this they now directed their steps. At the end of the bridge they stopped. The bridge was elevated sufficiently so that they could see a considerable distance northward, and for some moments they stood and looked in silence at the sight which lay beyond them.
It was something which is only to be seen once in the course of an ordinary lifetime—the complete ruin of the integral part of a great city. With something too remote yet too bitterly real for any words gripping at her heart, Helen stood looking out over a scene such as she never could have imagined. Here was ruin incarnate, desolation supreme; this was the bitter tragedy of that which once was great turned suddenly into pitiful nothingness before her very eyes.
In the foreground, at their feet, lay the heaped débris of the bricks, timbers, and contents of a whole row of dynamited buildings—the sacrificed buildings which by their own destruction had checked the conflagration at the last. There they lay, still smoldering or blazing in some places, utterly still and lifeless in others, with stray beams and bits of cornice or of tin roofing, twisted into weird shapes, sticking out at odd angles. Here and there unconsumed and hardly damaged articles that had been contained in these buildings lay unheeded; for here where the flames had died, they had not destroyed everything combustible, as they had seemed to do almost everywhere else. On the west side of Shawmut Avenue, where the houses still stood intact, a few men were to be seen; these were the state militiamen in their fatigue uniforms, patrolling the ruins. Smith called Helen's attention to them.