"You mustn't go out there alone, whatever happens!" she exclaimed. "I just won't let you! But tell me," she questioned again, "how much have you really found out about them--whatever they are." "Not much. They seem to be part of a nomadic race of half-human things, that's about all I can tell as yet. Perhaps all the white and yellow peoples perished utterly in the cataclysm, leaving only a few scattered blacks. You know blacks _are_ immune to several germ-infections that destroy other races." "Yes. And you mean--?" "It's quite possible these fellows are the far-distant and degenerate survivors of that other time." "So the whole world may have gone to pieces the way Liberia and Haiti and Santo Domingo once did, when white rule ceased?" "Yes, only a million times more so. I see you know your history! _If_ my hypothesis is correct, and only a few thousand blacks escaped, you can easily imagine what must have happened." "For a while, maybe fifty or a hundred years, they may have kept some sort of dwindling civilization. Probably the English language for a while continued, in ever more and more corrupt forms. There may have been some pretense of maintaining the school system, railroads, steamship lines, newspapers and churches, banks and all the rest of that wonderfully complex system we once knew. But after a while--" "Yes? What _then?_" "Why, the whole false shell crumbled, that's all. It must have! History shows it. It didn't take a hundred years after Toussaint L'Ouverture and Dessalines, in Haiti, for the blacks to shuck off French civilization and go back to grass huts and human sacrifice--to make another little Central Africa out of it, in the backwoods districts, at any rate. And _we_--have had a thousand, Beatrice, since the white man died!" She thought a moment, and shook her head. "What a story," she murmured, "what an incredible, horribly fascinating story that would make, if it could ever be known, or written! Think of the ebb-tide of everything! Railroads abandoned and falling to pieces, cities crumbling, ships no longer sailing, language and arts and letters forgotten, agriculture shrinking back to a few patches of corn and potatoes, and then to nothing at all, everything changing, dying, stopping--and the ever-increasing yet degenerating people leaving the city ruins, which they could not rebuild--taking to the fields, the forests, the mountains--going down, down, back toward the primeval state, down through barbarism, through savagery, to--what?" "To what we see!" answered the engineer, bitterly. "To animals, retaining by ghastly mockery some use of fire and of tools. All this, according to _one_ theory." "Is there another?" she asked eagerly. "Yes, and I wish we had the shade of Darwin, of Haeckel or of Clodd here with us to help us work it out!" "How do you imagine it?"