"Twenty-six hundred years an hour," mused George. "That's what we're making now. Forty-five years a minute. A century almost every two minutes!" The clock had registered thirty minutes more when Rogers declared he was sufficiently rested. At George's suggestion they ate a light meal; then they started their flight southward again. "How about looking at the dials now," George remarked. "They were at sixty-five hundred, thirty minutes ago." "Eight thousand," Rogers read. "That's fifteen hundred more. It figures out to three thousand an hour. That's our peak, I think." The flight now was passing through constantly changing conditions; every two minutes the plane was covering some three or four miles of space and a century of time. They crossed above North Carolina and came to the coast again. The cities of the civilization beneath them seemed to be breaking up. Here and there one stood in its glory; others were mere deserted piles of ruins over which the vegetation crawled, eager to devour. Still other cities and villages appeared over the southern horizon, sturdy and whole--and they melted as they slid beneath the plane, into crumbling piles that passed out of sight to the north. Soon desolate areas appeared. The scene grew vaguely whiter; the snow was coming down from the north faster than the plane was flying. Changes in the coast line became apparent; unfamiliar arms of the sea swept into view, and were crossed and left behind. A small, unfamiliar island lay close to the South Carolina coast. But as a whole, the land and sea held their own, even against the ravages of so many centuries. "The north wind is with us--the wind Loto described that blew southward almost all the year. What time is it?" "By the clock or the dials?" "The clock. I have the dials here. Eighteen thousand four hundred years is their reading." "Quarter of six," announced George. "We should sight the island shortly," Rogers said. "I'll fly a trifle slower. We must be nearly down to Georgia by now--to where Georgia used to be, I should say. I want to sight the island at twenty thousand years, or thereabouts." The land was growing white; the vegetation sparser. Small towns and hamlets that endured for no more than fifty or a hundred years were springing up everywhere, and melting into nothing in a moment or two. The vegetation was shifting, changing, but always the scene was growing whiter. The villages were sparser, smaller and shorter lived--the people struggling southward against the threatening, unrelenting cold, which spared nothing but the island of the Anglese. Rogers was first to notice a radical departure from the normal conformation of the landscape. They were, by their own calculation, over Georgia. George, watching the dials closely, had just noted twenty-two thousand years. Far ahead, over the rim of the southwestern horizon, a line of mountains was rising.