Those men who survived
those eager to obey, eager to live for one
another, since they had nothing else to
vindicate them--those men could neither carry
on, nor preserve what they had received.
Thus did all thought, all science,
all wisdom perish on earth. Thus did men--
men with nothing to offer save their great number--
lost the steel towers, the flying ships,
the power wires, all the things they had
not created and could never keep. Perhaps,
later, some men had been born with the
mind and the courage to recover these
things which were lost; perhaps these men
came before the Councils of Scholars.
They were answered as I have been answered--
and for the same reasons.
But I still wonder how it was possible,
in those graceless years of transition,
long ago, that men did not see whither they
were going, and went on, in blindness and
cowardice, to their fate. I wonder, for it
is hard for me to conceive how men who
knew the word "I" could give it up and
not know what they lost. But such has been
the story, for I have lived in the City of
the damned, and I know what horror men
permitted to be brought upon them.
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