narrow strip
about the equator, was one great silent desolate vista of stark
ice-plains, ice that brooded above the hidden ruins of cities that had
endured for hundreds of thousands of years. It was terrible to imagine
the awful solitude and the endless twilight that lay on these places,
and the grim snow, sailing in silence over all....

It surrounded us on all sides, until life remained only in a few
scattered clearings all about that equator of the globe, with an eternal
fire going to hold away the hungry Ice. Perpetual winter reigned now;
and we were becoming terror-stricken beasts that preyed on each other
for a life already doomed. Ah, but I, I the archaic survival, I had my
revenge then, with my great physique and strong jaws--God! Let me think
of something else. Those men who lived upon each other--it was horrible.
And I was one.

* * * * *

So inevitably the Ice closed in.... One day the men of our tiny clearing
were but a score. We huddled about our dying fire of bones and stray
logs. We said nothing. We just sat, in deep, wordless, thoughtless
silence. We were the last outpost of Mankind.

I think suddenly something very noble must have transformed these
creatures to a semblance of what they had been of old. I saw, in their
eyes, the question they sent from one to another, and in every eye I saw
that the answer was, Yes. With one accord they rose before my eyes and,
ignoring me as a baser creature, they stripped away their load of
tattered rags and, one by one, they stalked with their tiny shrivelled
limbs into the shivering gale of swirling, gusting snow, and
disappeared. And I was alone....

So am I alone now. I have written this last fantastic history of myself
and of Mankind upon a substance that will, I know, outlast even the snow
and the Ice--as it has outlasted Mankind that made it. It is the only
thing with which I have never parted. For is it not irony that I should
be the historian of this race--I, a savage, an "archaic survival?" Why
do I write? God knows, but some instinct prompts me, although there will
never be men to read.

I have been sitting here, waiting, and I have thought often of Sir John
and Alice, whom I loved. Can it be that I am feeling again, after all
these ages, some tiny portion of that emotion, that great passion I once
knew? I see her face before me, the face I have lost from my thoughts
for eons, and something is in it that stirs my blood