"But of our history I have told you little; nor have you seen the book! Yet you must see it, for it alone remains to us of that other, better time. And though my folk mock at it as imposture and myth and fraud, you shall judge if it be true; you shall see what has kept the English speech alive in me, kept memories of the upper world alive. Only the book, the book!" His voice seemed strangely agitated. As he spoke he raised his hands toward them, sitting on the stone bench in the hut, while outside the rain still thundered louder than the droning roar of the great flame. Stern, his curiosity suddenly aroused, looked at the old man with keen interest. "The book?" he queried. "What book? What's the name of it? What date? What--who wrote it, and--" "Patience, friends!" "You mean you've really got an English book here in this village? A--" "A book, verily, from the other days! But first, before I show you, let me tell you the old tradition that was handed down to me by my father and my father's fathers, down through centuries--I know not how many." "You mean the story of this Lost Folk in the Abyss?" "Verily! You have told me yours, of your awakening, of the ruined world and all your struggles and your fall down into this cursed pit. Listen now to mine!" CHAPTER XXXIII THE PATRIARCH'S TALE "In the beginning," he commanded, slowly and thoughtfully, "our people were as yours; they were the same. Our tradition tells that a great breaking of the world took place very many centuries ago. Out of the earth a huge portion was split, and it became as the moon you tell of, only dark. It circled about the earth--" "By Jove!" cried Stern, and started to his feet. "That dark patch in the sky! That moving mystery we saw nights at the bungalow on the Hudson!" "You mean--" the girl exclaimed. "It's a new planetoid! Another satellite of the earth! It's the split-off part of the world!" "Another satellite?" "Of course! Hang it, yes! See now? The great explosion that liberated the poisonous gases and killed practically everybody in the world must have gouged this new planet out of the flank of Mother Earth in the latter part of 1920. The ejected portions, millions of millions of tons, hundreds of thousands of cubic miles of solid rock--and with them the ruins of Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Omaha, and hundreds of smaller cities--are now all revolving in a fixed, regular orbit, some few thousand miles or so from the surface! "Think! Ours are the only living human eyes that have seen this new world blotting out the stars! This explains everything--the singular changes in the tides and in the direction of the magnetic pole, decreased gravitation and all the other strange things we noticed, but couldn't understand. By Gad! What a discovery!" The patriarch listened eagerly while Stern and the girl discussed the strange phenomenon; but when their excitement had subsided and they were ready again to hear him, he began anew: