hn. "The window's plastered up.
You can't open it."
Challenger stooped and raised his wife, pressing her to his breast, while
she threw her arms round his neck.
"Give me that field-glass, Malone," said he gravely.
I handed it to him.
"Into the hands of the Power that made us we render ourselves again!" he
shouted in his voice of thunder, and at the words he hurled the
field-glass through the window.
Full in our flushed faces, before the last tinkle of falling fragments
had died away, there came the wholesome breath of the wind, blowing
strong and sweet.
I don't know how long we sat in amazed silence. Then as in a dream, I
heard Challenger's voice once more.
"We are back in normal conditions," he cried. "The world has cleared the
poison belt, but we alone of all mankind are saved."
Chapter V
THE DEAD WORLD
I remember that we all sat gasping in our chairs, with that sweet, wet
south-western breeze, fresh from the sea, flapping the muslin curtains
and cooling our flushed faces. I wonder how long we sat! None of us
afterwards could agree at all on that point. We were bewildered,
stunned, semi-conscious. We had all braced our courage for death, but
this fearful and sudden new fact--that we must continue to live after we
had survived the race to which we belonged--struck us with the shock of a
physical blow and left us prostrate. Then gradually the suspended
mechanism began to move once more; the shuttles of memory worked; ideas
weaved themselves together in our minds. We saw, with vivid, merciless
clearness, the relations between the past, the present, and the
future--the lives that we had led and the lives which we would have to
live. Our eyes turned in silent horror upon those of our companions and
found the same answering look in theirs. Instead of the joy which men
might have been expected to feel who had so narrowly escaped an imminent
death, a terrible wave of darkest depression submerged us. Everything on
earth that we loved had been washed away into the great, infinite,
unknown ocean, and here were we marooned upon this desert island of a
world, without companions, hopes, or aspirations. A few years' skulking
like jackals among the graves of the human race and then our belated and
lonely end would come.
"It's dreadful, George, dreadful!" the lady cried in an agony of sobs.
"If we had only passed with the others! Oh, why did you save us? I feel
as if it is we that are dea
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