Soon there would be nothing left but the silent golden sun, the ruddy sands ... and another quiet skeleton watching the brassy sky with dark, unseeing eyes of bone. Thorne cracked his tortured lips in a grin. At least it would not be in a gutter of Vulhan City or face down in the flooding Nergal tide, a shoaling hulk....
Slowly he moved on through the night. He had lost track of how many nights. It was cooler so. He watched Phobos rise in cool splendor far across the sands, a thin black streak standing upright across her shining disk. For a moment he stared in dull, uncomprehending wonder, then bent his head and plodded quietly onward.
Why he walked he did not know, for he had long ceased to question this strange, ultimate Odyssey on which he had embarked. He only knew he must go on and on, the one unreasoning urge linking him to the old, proud heritage of the pioneers of trail and sea and space. And for such as he there was no turning back....
When he tripped upon a rotted balk of timber and pitched headlong to the sand he did not know. For a moment he lay there, unmoving. Then, with a sigh, he attempted to rise, but exhaustion swept over his relaxed body in a shuddering flood and he sank back, asleep almost before he touched the sand.
It was the growing heat of the sun that awakened him, well past mid-day. Dull, lack-lustre eyes opened and stared unseeingly upward. Grimy, wasted hands twitched weakly upon the sand. A faint breath like a sigh crept between the cracked and swollen lips.
It was minutes later, as he instinctively groped for his friend's spear to lay across his chest as had those others ere they died, that Thorne came to realize he could not see the sun. Hot, dusty radiations danced about over his head, and glimmering motes hung in the shadowy depths beyond his weakened vision, but somehow, faintly, the realization of shadow crept over his worn-out consciousness. With the realization came a slowly growing perception of light as he focused his eyes upon the tapering, unbelievable mass of the gigantic monolith looming over him.
Three thousand feet it leaped into the Martian sky, a ragged, broken tower of grey-white stone, turreted with fantastic decay, eroded and pitted by the storms and dust of twice ten thousand years.
He turned his head. Beyond it loomed another, only slightly less massive, but far more eroded. Here and there, standing in a rough semi-circle, other towers reared their broken heads into the brassy bowl of the sky, mere shattered heaps of dusty rubble.
Slowly Thorne sat up. He was huddled at the base of the tallest monument atop a sloping pile of broken sand and shards drifting down from the decaying walls. Beneath him long gray shadows of what had once been piers crept out into a low, extensive basin of sand, broken here and there by heaped mounds jagged with age-greyed timber.