All was flat on a large scale, and crumpled on a small: hard, bitter
rock like cubes set on edge, careening madly this way and that. Within
its valleys were patches of earth, green with grass and weeds, punctured
ever and again by corroded girders and iron masonry-bars, to which clung
bits of ornamental stone and naked, crumbling concrete. Trees were
scarce and never large, their greatest numbers clustered in isolated
patches a short distance from the coast, which seemed to have received
the largest deposits of earth.
Sylviana easily saw what she had always known, that the skyline of
Manhattan had been built upon solid bedrock. For this reason alone had
the Island survived at all, blasted as it must have been by successive
nuclear explosions. And with this she realized suddenly where the
deposits of earth had come from. Besides the fact that the continental
coast had been ravaged..... Long Island was gone! Just GONE. Nothing
but ocean stretched eastward as far as the eye could see.
And this made her see, vividly, what she had hitherto thought of and
imagined as little as possible. While her father had whisked her away
and put her to sleep, like an enchanted princess, in the Canadian
Rockies, an entire world had been pounded and burned to death. And the
remote, less habited places of the globe had been no better off, their
children, both man and animal alike, left to die and distort in the
slower ravages of radiation poisoning.
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