It was after five o'clock. The dials registered just short of eight thousand years. I had less to see now, and I could give my attention to other things. The ruins of a dead city do not remain long in visible existence. Two thousand years more were recorded. Beneath me the vegetation seemed untouched by the hand of man; only in a few scattered places were there any remaining ruins: a tumbledown segment of building; the broken base of a tower; skeletons of crumbling steel here and there; headstones on the grave of what once had been a city. With these changes the contour of the landscape itself was forced to my attention. The rivers had changed; they were broader. South of Manhattan Island, and somewhat to the west, I could distinguish a great expanse of water. All the lowlands there--the "Meadows," as we call them--had sunk. To the north, the land seemed higher than normal, and an arm of the sea had crept in up there to lap the foothills. I have not told you of the temperature I was experiencing. When I started there was an almost immediate drop--a blending of day and night, winter and summer. It penetrated into the cabin, making the ship almost cold after the warm August evening of my departure. Now, however, at seven o'clock, when I had been gone some nine hours, I felt that it was growing noticeably colder. And the faintest suggestion of a vague whiteness began to creep into the scene below me. That is an odd way for me to phrase it. I was seeing each minute only the _effect_ of the snowfalls of thirty winters, blended with all the other seasons. The snowfalls were increasing in severity; I became aware of that in the aspect of the scene, but I cannot describe it. It was after seven o'clock now. I had been gone about nine and a half hours. The dials showed eleven thousand four hundred and fifty odd years. I now faced a new problem: the landscape we had seen in our experiment had nothing in it of great duration. How could I find it, or tell when I had reached its time? That house in which the girl was held captive could stand no more than a hundred years, if that. And it was the only distinguishing mark in the whole scene. I would pass the lifetime of that house in a minute or two. I puzzled over this for quite a while. I had almost decided to stop and verify the actual, momentary conditions beneath me. And then I realized I still had far to go. There were trees, plenty of them, beneath me. They were constantly shifting and changing, but quite distinguishable, nevertheless. And in the enclosure about that house, Father and I had seen a tree--the only tree in the landscape. It was a curious looking tree, stunted, and with a look of the far north about it. These below me, at eleven and twelve thousand years ahead of our present, were more or less normal looking trees--or they probably would have been, had I stopped to examine them.