His reason, too, came quickly to his rescue. These mountains and the far slope toward the Pacific Coast were smothered in their forests. And trees were life--biological life. If there was plant life there would be germination, bacteria--surely animal bacteria, surely animal life at however low a scale. Though perhaps not men. Perhaps not men! Then this was indeed the grand adventure. He headed south again. All these speculations and the resultant skittering about, as O'Hara said, had eaten into his flying time and he had not made the progress that he had anticipated, yet it was not quite two o'clock, not ninety minutes after he had crashed through the Curtain, when O'Hara saw a compelling flash of light upon his right. It was the first time that he had been conscious of the increasing clarity of the sun, no longer so obscured by clouds or ice fogs. O'Hara spiraled down toward a wide plateau, ringed with a lesser inner range of mountains. The flash, he discovered, was reflected from a rectangular object, rather like a huge jewel, set into the face of a tall pile of masonry that reached some thirty stories high, a single needle rising from the snow-clad plain. Losing altitude fast, very nearly making of it a power dive, O'Hara pulled out of it level with the tower--for that was what it proved to be, a giant tower of stone and metal, expertly fashioned, a glittering and soaring pinnacle unlike anything that he had ever seen. The flash was a reflection from the gemlike surface, which apparently was glass. The upper story seemed to be a kind of solarium, with six facets so arranged that they caught the sun constantly. The stories below it lacked openings of any sort, and O'Hara concluded that if in fact the tower had once been used for offices or dwellings those who lived there had relied entirely upon indirect lighting. He was convinced that it was deserted now. There was a complete deadness to it, a stone and metal tower rising abruptly from a snow-blanketed plain, long abandoned, long forgotten. And descending lower, he could make out the geometric patterns of low structures and broad avenues, but with a skeletal emptiness about them, the roofs collapsed, the walls themselves in many places having toppled into the general ruin. A dead city, certainly, yet once it must have been a metropolis, culminating in its strange, massive tower before it died. "Forgotten names from forgotten histories came back to me," he said. "The northwest coast--not Vancouver? Not Seattle? No, for both of them had been upon the coast itself. Spokane, then? Or possibly some city that had flourished after the establishment of the Curtain? But it did not matter, the place was dead, with the anonymity of the dead. A graveyard of a civilization that had been the mightiest on earth. Yet the proof that this civilization actually had existed--that it was no myth--was enormously stimulating to me. It was my second big moment."