VII

Other charts⁠—and most significantly one in connection with the founding fifty million years ago of the vast dead city around us⁠—showed all the present continents well differentiated. And in the latest discoverable specimen⁠—dating perhaps from the Pliocene Age⁠—the approximate world of today appeared quite clearly despite the linkage of Alaska with Siberia, of North America with Europe through Greenland, and of South America with the Antarctic continent through Graham Land.

In the Carboniferous map the whole globe⁠—ocean floor and rifted land mass alike⁠—bore symbols of the Old Ones’ vast stone cities, but in the later charts the gradual recession toward the Antarctic became very plain.

The final Pliocene specimen showed no land cities except on the Antarctic continent and the tip of South America, nor any ocean cities north of the fiftieth parallel of South Latitude. Knowledge and interest in the northern world, save for a study of coast lines probably made during long exploration flights on those fan-like membranous wings, had evidently declined to zero among the Old Ones.

Destruction of cities through the upthrust of mountains, the centrifugal rending of continents, the seismic convulsions of land or sea bottom, and other natural causes was a matter of common record; and it was curious to observe how fewer and fewer replacements were made as the ages wore on.

The vast dead megalopolis that yawned around us seemed to be the last general center of the race⁠—built early in the Cretaceous Age after a titanic earth buckling had obliterated a still vaster predecessor not far distant.