Challenger stooped and raised his wife, pressing her to his breast, while she threw her arms round his neck.

“Give me that field-glass, Malone,” said he gravely.

I handed it to him.

“Into the hands of the Power that made us we render ourselves again!” he shouted in his voice of thunder, and at the words he hurled the field-glass through the window.

Full in our flushed faces, before the last tinkle of falling fragments had died away, there came the wholesome breath of the wind, blowing strong and sweet.

I don’t know how long we sat in amazed silence.  Then as in a dream, I heard Challenger’s voice once more.

“We are back in normal conditions,” he cried.  “The world has cleared the poison belt, but we alone of all mankind are saved.”

Chapter V

THE DEAD WORLD

I remember that we all sat gasping in our chairs, with that sweet, wet south-western breeze, fresh from the sea, flapping the muslin curtains and cooling our flushed faces.  I wonder how long we sat!  None of us afterwards could agree at all on that point.  We were bewildered, stunned, semi-conscious.  We had all braced our courage for death, but this fearful and sudden new fact—­that we must continue to live after we had survived the race to which we belonged—­struck us with the shock of a physical blow and left us prostrate.  Then gradually the suspended mechanism began to move once more; the shuttles of memory worked; ideas weaved themselves together in our minds.  We saw, with vivid, merciless clearness, the relations between the past, the present, and the future—­the lives that we had led and the lives which we would have to live.  Our eyes turned in silent horror upon those of our companions and found the same answering look in theirs.  Instead of the joy which men might have been expected to feel who had so narrowly escaped an imminent death, a terrible wave of darkest depression submerged us.  Everything on earth that we loved had been washed away into the great, infinite, unknown ocean, and here were we marooned upon this desert island of a world, without companions, hopes, or aspirations.  A few years’ skulking like jackals among the graves of the human race and then our belated and lonely end would come.

“It’s dreadful, George, dreadful!” the lady cried in an agony of sobs.  “If we had only passed with the others!  Oh, why did you save us?  I feel as if it is we that are dead and everyone else alive.”

Challenger’s great eyebrows were drawn down in concentrated thought, while his huge, hairy paw closed upon the outstretched hand of his wife.  I had observed that she always held out her arms to him in trouble as a child would to its mother.

“Without being a fatalist to the point of nonresistance,” said he, “I have always found that the highest wisdom lies in an acquiescence with the actual.”  He spoke slowly, and there was a vibration of feeling in his sonorous voice.