The only suggestion of habitation was a thin pencil of smoke rising some distance across the plateau he faced. For as long as he could, he pretended not to recognize the ruins sparsely dotting the landscape--vast mountainous stumps of structures, buckled and tortured things, blackened and ice-streaked, surrounded by strange formations of rock that suggested lava ridges, as if the very ground had melted and churned and boiled when those ruins were made. A ruined world, from which the last rays of a setting sun, piercing for a moment the smoky ruins, struck dismal yellow highlights. But recognition could only be held at bay for a few minutes. His guess about the ravine had been correct. That snow-shrouded, mile-long mound ahead of him was the grave of the Opal Cross. That dark monolith far to the left was the stump of the Gray H. Those two lopped towers, crazily buckled and leaning toward each other as if for support, were the Gray Twins. That split and jagged mass the other side of the ravine, black against the encroaching ice, up-thrust like the hand of a buried man, was the Rusty T. It could hardly be World I, no matter after what catastrophe or lapse of years. For there was no sign, not even a suggestive hump, of the Blue Lorraine, the Mauve Z, or the Myrtle Y. Nor World II, for the Black Star's ruins would have bulked monstrously on the immediate left. He looked at his hands. They were thickened and calloused, ridged and darkened by scars of wounds and frostbite, the nails grained and uneven. And yet they were Thorn's hands. He lifted them and touched his chapped, scaly face, with its high-growing, uncombed beard and long hair matted against his neck under the fur hood. His clothes were a miscellany of stiff, inexpertly-tanned furs, portions of a worn and dirty suit of flying togs, and improvised bits of stuff, such as the hacked-out sections of elastoid flooring constituting the soles of his boots. His heavy belt, which was reinforced with reading-tape, supported two pouches, besides the knife, which seemed to be a crudely-hilted cutter from a hyperlathe. One of the pouches contained a sling shot powered by strips of elastoid, several large pebbles, and three dark, dubious chunks of meat. In the other were two small containers of nutriment-concentrate with packaging-insignia of twenty-five years ago, a stimulol cannister with one pellet left, two bits of sharp metal, a jagged fragment of flint, three more pieces of elastoid, more reading-tape, a cord made of sinew, a glastic lens, a wood carver's handsaw, a small, dismantled heat-projector showing signs of much readaptive tinkering, several unidentifiable objects, and--the smooth gray sphere he had stolen at the Yggdrasil.