"Come, let's go on up to the top of the tower, up to the observation-platform. The quicker we know all the available facts the better. Now, if I only had a telescope--!" He thought hard a moment, then turned and strode over to a heap of friable disintegration that lay where once his instrument case had stood, containing his surveying tools. Down on his ragged knees he fell; his rotten shreds of clothing tore and ripped at every movement, like so much water-soaked paper. A strange, hairy, dust-covered figure, he knelt there. Quickly he plunged his hands into the rubbish and began pawing it over and over with eager haste. "Ah!" he cried with triumph. "Thank Heaven, brass and lenses haven't crumbled yet!" Up he stood again. In his hand the girl saw a peculiar telescope. "My 'level,' see?" he exclaimed, holding it up to view. "The wooden tripod's long since gone. The fixtures that held it on won't bother me much. "Neither will the spirit-glass on top. The main thing is that the telescope itself seems to be still intact. Now we'll see." Speaking, he dusted off the eye-piece and the objective with a bit of rag from his coat-sleeve. Beatrice noted that the brass tubes were all eaten and pitted with verdigris, but they still held firmly. And the lenses, when Stern had finished cleaning them, showed as bright and clear as ever. "Come, now; come with me," he bade. Out through the doorway into the hall he made his way while the girl followed. As she went she gathered her wondrous veil of hair more closely about her. In this universal disorganization, this wreck of all the world, how little the conventions counted! Together, picking their way up the broken stairs, where now the rust-bitten steel showed through the corroded stone and cement in a thousand places, they cautiously climbed. Here, spider-webs thickly shrouded the way, and had to be brushed down. There, still more bats bung and chippered in protest as the intruders passed. A fluffy little white owl blinked at them from a dark niche; and, well toward the top of the climb, they flushed up a score of mud-swallows which had ensconced themselves comfortably along a broken balustrade. At last, however, despite all unforeseen incidents of this sort, they reached the upper platform, nearly a thousand feet above the earth. Out through the relics of the revolving door they crept, he leading, testing each foot of the way before the girl. They reached the narrow platform of red tiling that surrounded the tower. Even here they saw with growing amazement that the hand of time and of this maddening mystery had laid its heavy imprint. "Look!" he exclaimed, pointing. "What this all means we don't know yet. How long it's been we can't tell. But to judge by the appearance up here, it's even longer than I thought. See, the very tiles are cracked and crumbling.