Earth Abides

He awoke so early, one morning, that the room was still in half-darkness. He lay quiet for a moment, wondering where he was, and for a moment he thought that he was a small boy again and had crawled into his mother’s bed for comfort in the early morning. Then he realized that it could not be so, and he thought that if he stretched out his hand he would find Em lying there beside him. But that was not so, either. Then he thought of his young wife. But no, she would not be there either, for long ago he had given her to a younger man because it is right that a woman should bear children so that the tribe will increase and the darkness draw farther back. So then at last he realized that he was a very old man, and was lying in the bed by himself. Nevertheless, it was the same bed and the same room.

There was a strange dryness in his throat. After a minute he slowly got out of bed, and uncertainly on his old stiff legs he walked to the bathroom for a drink of water. As he went into the bathroom, he stretched out his right hand, and flipped the electric-light switch. It made the familiar click, and suddenly the room was brilliant to his eyes. Then after a moment he found himself in the half-darkness of dawn again, and he realized that the electric light had not flashed on. It had not so flashed for years, and would never again—and the familiar click had merely fooled his old brain, so that for a moment the room had seemed light. All this did not bother him, because it had thus happened before.

Also, when he turned the stiff faucet-handle at the washbowl, no water gushed out merrily. Then he remembered that years ago the water had ceased to run.

He could not get his drink of water, but he was not so much thirsty as merely bothered by that dryness in the throat.

After he had swallowed a few times, he felt better. When he stood by the bedside again, he hesitated, sniffing. He could remember many changes of smells through the years. Far back there had been the smell of a great city. That had given way to the clean smell of green things and growth. But that also had yielded, and now there was about the old house a smell of age and decay. That smell, however, was familiar and was not bothering him. What he was trying to assay was a kind of dry smokiness. That dryness, he considered, had made him wake up so early. But he felt no fear, and crawled into bed again.

A steady wind was blowing from the north. It tossed the pine trees that now grew closely around the house, and the branches swished and knocked against the windows and against the walls of the house.

The noise kept him awake, and he lay there listening. He wished that he knew the time, but he no longer kept a clock wound. Time in its old sense of appointments to be kept and things to be done—all that had long since ceased to exist, both because the way of life had changed and because he himself was so old as to be almost out of life. In certain ways he had already, as it seemed, passed from time to eternity.

Now he lay by himself in the old and half-ruined house. The others slept in other houses, or in good weather lay in the open. Perhaps they felt that ghosts walked in this old house. Well, perhaps! To Ish himself the thoughts of those who had been long dead were often more immediately present than the bodies of those now living.

Though he had no clock, the half-light told him that the time could not be much before sunrise. Perhaps he had slept as long as an old man needed to sleep. He would lie there, turning himself over occasionally, until the sun had risen, and someone—he hoped it would be the young man called Jack—came to bring him his breakfast. There would be a well-braised beef bone on which he could suck, and some corn-meal boiled into a mush. The Tribe took good care of him, an old man. They let him have corn-meal though that was something of a rarity with them. They sent someone to carry his hammer and help him outdoors, so that he could sit on the hillside when there was sunshine. Often the one who came to help him was Jack. Yes, they took very good care of him, even though he was a useless old man. Sometimes they grew angry with him and pinched him, but that was only because they thought he was a god.

The wind still blew, and the branches brushed and slapped against the house. But he had apparently not slept as much as he needed to sleep, and after a while he drowsed off, in spite of the noises.

The cuts in the hills and the long embankments for the roads—they will still show as narrow valleys and ridges even after ten thousand years have passed. The great masses of concrete that were the dams—they will remain like the dikes of the granite itself.