Yes, I was a fool, but I was in love, and though I was suffering the greatest misery I had ever known I would not have had it otherwise for all the riches of Barsoom. Such is love, and such are lovers wherever love is known.
To me, Dejah Thoris was all that was perfect; all that was virtuous and beautiful and noble and good. I believed that from the bottom of my heart, from the depth of my soul on that night in Korad as I sat cross-legged upon my silks while the nearer moon of Barsoom raced through the western sky toward the horizon, and lighted up the gold and marble, and jeweled mosaics of my world-old chamber, and I believe it today as I sit at my desk in the little study overlooking the Hudson. Twenty years have intervened; for ten of them I lived and fought for Dejah Thoris and her people, and for ten I have lived upon her memory.
* I have used the word "radium" in describing this powder because in the light of recent discoveries on Earth I believe it to be a mixture of which radium is the base. In Captain Carter's manuscript it is mentioned always by the name used in the written language of Helium and is spelled in hieroglyphics which it would be difficult and useless to reproduce.
The Cavalier and the Scrap Book
January [undated]-January 20, 1912
"•"•"•"•"• • • • • • • •
DARKNESS AND DAWN
by George Allan England
George Allan England began writing scientific romances almost simultaneously with Edgar Rice Burroughs, and though he is one of the most important figures among the school of writers who wrote the scientific romance, he was no imitator. His trilogy, Darkness and Dawn, Beyond the Great Oblivion, and The Afterglow opened a great opportunity to him which he failed to exploit.
He was born in Nebraska, February 9, 1877, and raised on Army posts, since his father was a military officer. When his family moved to Boston, he worked his way through Harvard, receiving a degree, incipient T.B., and a nervous breakdown in that order. Recovering from his illness in the Maine woods, he tried his hand at writing and sold his first story in 1903. His initial science fiction was a time-travel story, The Time Reflector, in THE MONTHLY STORY BLUE BOOK MAGAZINE for October 5, 1905. His first sale to Frank A. Munsey Co. was At the Eleventh Hour (THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, December, 1905).
He evidently had a knowledge of several foreign languages, for he was paid sixty dollars for a translation from the French of The Horla, by Guy de Maupassant, which appeared in the June, 1911, THE SCRAP BOOK; and a book appeared under his byline titled Their Son and the Necklace, which was claimed to be a translation from the Spanish.
His early difficulties in procuring an education embittered him at the "system."' and he became a militant socialist, writing many pamphlets for the movement as well as proselytizing in his novels The Golden Blight and The Air Trust.
England tried to live some of the adventure he wrote, and shipped aboard a sealing vessel to the arctic, telling his experiences in Vikings of the Ice (Doubleday, Page & Co., 1924), including a photo of himself. The arctic fascinated him, and he wrote several novels of that locale.
His favorite avocation was treasure hunting, and he organized expeditions to dredge up ancient gold, jewels, and even whiskey from the bottom of the sea. His novelette May Gold (REAL DETECTIVE TALES AND MYSTERY STORIES, December, 1929-January 1930) was based on a personal expedition to locate such treasure.
In an article titled Facts About Fantasy (THE STORY WORLD, July, 1923), he advised other writers that "one of the most profitable fields of fiction, if the writer knows how to cultivate it, is that which for lack of a better term we may call 'pseudo-scientific'!" He failed to follow his own advice, and for the last sixteen years of his life, prior to his death June 26, 1936, wrote very little fantasy. Were it not for his science fiction, his name would have already disappeared into oblivion.
George Allan England's name is synonymous with his most famous work, Darkness and Dawn, and a unit of that novel, virtually complete in itself, follows. This segment starts at the very beginning of the story, where a man and a woman from New York City at the turn of the century awaken thousands of years in the future when civilization has been destroyed and changes in the earth's features as well as monstrously mutated "humans" offer little hope of survival. The organization of their resources to face the savage alternatives about them and the closeness required by mutual dependency inevitably creates a binding attachment. The full story is a classic, three novels in length, creating a memorable trilogy.
1. THE AWAKENING
DIMLY, LIKE THE daybreak glimmer of a sky long wrapped in fogs, a sign of consciousness began to dawn in the face of the tranced girl.
Once more the breath of life began to stir in that full bosom, to which again a vital warmth had on this day of days crept slowly back.
And as she lay there, prone upon the dusty floor, her beautiful face buried and shielded in the hollow of her arm, a sigh welled from her lips.
Life—life was flowing back again! The miracle of miracles was growing to reality.
Faintly now she breathed; vaguely her heart began to throb once more. She stirred. She moaned, still for the moment powerless to cast off wholly the enshrouding incubus of that tremendous, dreamless sleep.
Then her hands closed. The finely tapered fingers tangled themselves in the masses of thick, luxuriant hair which lay outspread all over and about her. The eyelids trembled.
And, a moment later, Beatrice Kendrick was sitting up, dazed and utterly uncomprehending, peering about her at the strangest vision which since the world began has ever been the lot to any human creature to behold. The vision of a place transformed beyond all power of the intellect to understand.
For of the room which she remembered, which had been her last sight when (so long, so very long, ago) her eyes had closed with that sudden and unconquerable drowsiness, of that room, I say, remained only walls, ceiling, floor of rust-red steel and crumbling cement.
Quite gone was all the plaster, as by magic. Here or there a heap of whitish dust betrayed where some of its detritus still lay.
Gone was every picture, chart, and map which—but an hour since, it seemed to her—had decked this office of Allan Stern, consulting engineer; this aerie up in the forty-eighth story of the Metropolitan Tower.
Furniture there now was none. Over the still intact glass of the windows cobwebs were draped so thickly as almost to exclude the light of day—a strange, fly-infested curtain where once neat green shade-rollers had hung.
Even as the bewildered girl sat there, lips parted, eyes wide with amaze, a spider seized his buzzing prey and scampered back into a hole in the wall.
A huge, leathery bat, suspended upside down in the far corner, cheeped with dry, crepitant sounds of irritation.
Beatrice rubbed her eyes.
"What?" she said, quite slowly. "Dreaming? How singular! I only wish I could remember this when I wake up. Of all the dreams I ever had, this one's certainly the strangest. So real, so vivid! Why, I could swear I was awake—and yet—"
All at once a sudden doubt flashed into her mind. An uneasy expression dawned across her face. Her eyes grew wild with a great fear; the fear of utter and absolute incomprehension.
Something about this room, this weird awakening, bore in upon her consciousness the dread tidings this was not a dream!
Something drove home to her the fact that it was real, objective, positive! And with a gasp of fright she struggled up amid the litter and the rubbish of that uncanny room.
"Oh!" she cried in terror, as a huge scorpion, malevolent, and with its tail raised to strike, scuttled away and vanished through a gaping void where once the corridor door had swung. "Oh, oh! Where am I? What, what has happened?"
Horrified beyond all words, pale and staring, both hands clutched to her breast, whereon her very clothing now had torn and crumbled, she faced about.
It seemed to her as though some monstrous, evil thing was lurking in the dim corner at her back. She tried to scream, but no sound, save a choked gasp, i
ssued from her lips.
Then she started toward the doorway. Even as she took the first few steps her gown, a mere tattered mockery of raiment, fell away from her.
And, confronted by a new problem, she stopped short. She peered about her in vain for something to protect her disarray. There was nothing.
"Why, where's my chair? My desk?" she exclaimed thickly, starting toward the place by the window where they should have been, and were not. Her shapely feet fell soundlessly in that strange and impalpable dust which coated everything.
"My typewriter? Can that be my typewriter? Great Heavens! What's the matter here, with everything? Am I mad?"
There before her lay a somewhat larger pile of dust mixed with soft and punky splinters of rotten wood. Amid all this decay she saw some bits of rust, a corroded type-bar, or two, even a few rubber key-caps, still recognizable, though with the letters quite obliterated.
All about her, veiling her completely in a mantle of wondrous gloss and beauty, her lustrous hair fell, as she stooped to see this strange, incomprehensible phenomenon. She tried to pick up one of the rubber caps. At her merest touch it crumbled to an impalpable white powder.
With a shuddering cry, the girl sprang back, terrified.
"Merciful Heavens!" she whispered. "What does all this mean?"
For a moment she stood there, her every power of thought, of motion, numbed. Breathing not, she only stared in a wild kind of cringing amazement as perhaps you might if you should see a dead man move.
Then she ran to the door. Out into the hall she peered, this way and that, down the dismantled corridor, up the wreckage of the stairs, which were all cumbered, like the office itself, with dust and webs and vermin.
Aloud she hailed: "Oh! Help, help, help!" No answer. Even the echoes flung back only dull, vacuous sounds that deepened her sense of awful and incredible isolation.
What? No noise of human life anywhere to be heard? None! No familiar hum of the metropolis now rose from what were swarming streets and miles on miles of habitations.
Instead, a blank, unbroken, leaden silence, that seemed part of the musty, choking atmosphere. A silence that weighed down on Beatrice like funeral palls.
Dumbfounded by all this, and by the universal crumbling of every perishable thing, the girl ran, shuddering, back into the office. There in the dust her foot struck something hard.
She stooped; she caught it up and stared at it.
"My glass ink-well! What? Only such things remain?"
No dream, then, but reality! She knew at length that some catastrophe, incredibly vast, some disaster cosmic in the tragedy of its sweep, had desolated the world.
"Oh, my mother!" she cried. "My mother—dead? Dead, now, how long?"
She did not weep, but just stood there, cowering, a chill of anguished horror racking her. All at once her teeth began to chatter, her body to shake as with an ague.
For a moment, dazed and stunned, she remained there, not knowing which way to turn nor what to do. Then her terror-stricken gaze fell on the inner doorway, leading from her outer office to the inner one, the one where Stern had had his laboratory and his consultation room.
This door now hung, a few worm-eaten planks and splintered bits of wood, barely supported by the rusty hinges.
Toward it she staggered. She drew the sheltering masses of her hair about her, like a Godiva of another age; and to her eyes, womanlike, the hot tears mounted. As she went, she cried in a voice of horror:
"Mr. Stern! Oh, Mr. Stern! Are you dead, too? You can't be—it's too frightful!"
She reached the door. The mere touch of her outstretched hand disintegrated it. Down in a crumbling heap it fell. Thick dust bellied up in a cloud, through which a single sun-ray that entered the cobwebbed pane shot a radiant arrow.
Peering, hesitant, fearful of even greater terrors in that other room, Beatrice peered through this dust-haze. A sick foreboding of evil possessed her at thought of what she might find there—yet she was more afraid of what she knew lay there behind her.
For an instant she stood within the ruined doorway, her left hand resting on the moldy jamb. Then, with a cry, she started forward—a cry in which terror had given place to joy, despair to hope.
Forgotten now the fact that, save for the shrouding of her messy hair, she stood unclad. Forgotten the wreck, the desolation everywhere.
"Oh, thank Heaven!" she gasped.
There, in that inner office, half-rising from the wreck of many things that had been and were now no more, her startled eyes beheld the figure of a man—of Allan Stern!
He lived!
He peered at her with eyes that saw not, yet; toward her he groped a vague, unsteady hand. He lived! Not quite alone in this world-ruin, not all alone was she!
2. REALIZATION
THE JOY IN Beatrice's eyes gave way to poignant wonder as she gazed on him. Could this be he?
Yes, well she knew it was. She recognized him even through the grotesquery of his clinging rags, even behind the mask of a long, red, dusty beard and formidable mustache, even despite the wild and staring incoherence of his whole expression.
Yet how incredible the metamorphosis! There flashed to her a memory of this man, her other-time employer—keen and smooth-shaven, alert, well-dressed, self-centered, dominant. The master of a hundred complex problems, the directing mind of engineering works innumerable.
Faltering and uncertain now he stood there. Then, at the sound of the girl's voice, he staggered toward her with outflung hands. He stopped, and for a moment stared at her.
For he had had no time as yet to correlate his thoughts, to pull himself together.
And, while one's heart might throb ten times, Beatrice saw terror in his blinking, bloodshot eyes.
But almost at once the engineer got a mastery over himself. Even as Beatrice watched him, breathlessly, from the door, she saw his fear die out; she saw his courage well up fresh and strong.
It was almost as though something tangible were limning the man's soul upon his face. She thrilled at sight of him.
And though for a long moment no word was spoken, while the man and woman stood looking at each other like two children in some dread and unfamiliar attic, an understanding leaped between them.
Then, womanlike, instinctively as she breathed, the girl ran to him. Forgetful of every convention and of her disarray, she seized his hand. And in a voice that trembled till it broke she cried:
"What is it? What does all this mean? Tell me!"
She clung to him.
"Tell me the truth and save me! Is it real?"
Stern looked at her wonderingly. He smiled a strange, wan, mirthless smile.
He looked all about him. Then his lips moved, but for the moment no sound came.
He made another effort, this time successful.
"There, there," said he huskily, as though the dust and dryness of the innumerable years had got into his very voice. "There, now, don't be afraid.
"Something seems to have taken place here while—we've been asleep. What? What is it? I don't know yet. I'll find out. There's nothing to be alarmed about, at any rate."
"But—look!" She pointed at the hideous desolation.
"Yes, I see. But no matter. You're alive. I'm alive. That's two of us, anyhow. Maybe there are a lot more. We'll soon see. Whatever it may be, we'll win."
He turned and, trailing rags and streamers of rotten cloth that once had been a business suit, he waded through the confusion of wreckage on the floor, to the window.
If you have seen a weather-beaten scarecrow flapping in the wind, you have some notion of his outward guise. No tramp you ever laid eyes on could have offered so preposterous an appearance.
Down over his shoulders, fell the matted, dusty hair. His tangled beard reached far below his waist. Even his eyebrows, naturally rather light, had grown to a heavy thatch above his eyes.
Except that he was not gray or bent, and that he still seemed to have kept the resilient force of vigorous manhood, y
ou might have thought him some incredibly ancient Rip Van Winkle come to life upon that singular stage, there in the tower.
But he gave little time to introspection or the matter of his own appearance. With one quick gesture he swept away the shrouding tangle of webs, spiders, and dead flies that obscured the window. He peered out.
"Good heavens!" he cried, and started back.
The girl ran to him.
"What is it?" she exclaimed breathlessly.
"Why, I don't know—yet. But this is something big! Something universal! It's—it's—no, no, you'd better not look out. Not just yet."
"I must know everything. Let me see."
Now she was at his side, and, like him, staring out into the clear sunshine, out over the vast expanses of the city.
A moment's utter silence fell. Quite clearly hummed the protest of an imprisoned fly in a web at the top of the window. The breathing of the man and woman sounded quick and loud.
"All—wrecked?" cried Beatrice. "But—then—"
"Wrecked? It looks that way," the engineer answered, holding his emotions in control with a strong effort. "Why not be frank about this?
You'd better make up your mind at once to accept the very worst. I see no signs of anything else."
"The worst? You mean—"
"I mean just what we see out there. You can interpret it as well as I."
Again the silence while they looked, with emotions that could find no voicing in words. Instinctively the engineer passed an arm about the frightened girl and drew her close to him.
Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of the Scientific Romance in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 Page 9
