"Ships!" he whispered. "By all the Krue of Mars, ships!"
He dragged himself upright. A glance behind him showed him the futility of hope. The tremendous edifice at whose base he had fallen had ages since crumbled within itself until, collapsing inward, it had fused into one solid pillar of worn masonry and powdered sand. The others were even less preserved, but wrecked, shattered, decaying as they were, there remained about their hoary turrets a splendor so great he instinctively straightened his weary form. In the presence of so magnificent a declaration by man, he took on a new dignity worthy of their unyielding might.
Here, then, lay one of those ancient citadels of a long-gone race, the ancestors of the silent, peaceful Martians of today. A teeming metropolis of the North, it had shrunk and perished with the death of the drying seas whose disappearance had all but ruined the once-green planet, leaving up the blowing sands its gigantic bones in grisly memory of what once had been. And here, among these empty monoliths, Thorne knew at last he had come to the end of the spaceman's trail. He would go no farther.
Well, for such as he it should not be unwelcome. He took his hand from the powdery wall and weakly shook his head. It was a tedious business, this dying.
What it was that drew him out of the shadow and down the slope he never knew. Perhaps it was the numb indifference of despair, perhaps only the last, momentary flicker of that indomitable curiosity which had drawn the Earthman adventuring across the world and now flings it light-years wide over the Solar System. It served, nevertheless, to draw him wearily down from the rubble beneath the gigantic tower into the low basin which had been the tight harbor of this long-gone city of Mars. Automatically he trudged onward, to bring up presently before one of the low mounds dotting the harbor floor.
It had been a ship, he knew. What forgotten wood made up its mouldering bones to outlast the crumbling stone of its home port he did not know, nor greatly care. There had been so many great and wonderful things on Mars forgotten long since by the sad, wistful remnants of her dying peoples.
Lean, broken ribs thrust upward rudely through the golden sands, wooden-pegged planks still clinging forlornly to their splintered shafts. There had been metal, too ... copper, bronze, iron bolts, and silver trim on the poop. All had long since been looted by the wandering desert tribes who wandered furtively through these tremendous monuments of their forgotten past.
From mound to mound Thorne trudged with a weary indifference. As well to die thus on his feet as face up in the sun. For die he must. Water there was none, and the only vegetation an occasional low death-bush with utter agony buried in its flat, leprous leaf-pads. A cluster of brilliant t'ang sprays glittered savagely in the shady lee of a shattered wreck, and Thorne shuddered.
Here, too, death crept in wait, a death already fastened fang-deep in his sodden, pain-wracked body from a score of dingy Vulhan t'ang-hells. But what odds? The death from those dark and crimson fruits was quick and terrible, perhaps, but only quicker than the fate already lying in his veins. Let there be an end, even to this aimless wandering.