One young man felt an anxiety that was really ludicrous because he had promised to take his sweetheart to the theater that night, and if he did not come she would be very angry.  Another was to have been married in a week.  Some of the people were, like Van Deventer and Arthur, so situated that they could view the episode as an adventure, or, like Estelle, who had no immediate fear because all her family was provided for without her help and lived far from New York, so they would not learn of the catastrophe for some time.  Many, however, felt instant and pressing fear for the families whose expenses ran always so close to their incomes that the disappearance of the breadwinner for a week would mean actual want or debt.  There are very many such families in New York.

The people, therefore, that gathered hopelessly at the call of Van Deventer’s watchmen were dazed and spiritless.  Their excitement after Arthur’s first attempt to explain the situation to them had evaporated.  They were no longer keyed up to a high pitch by the startling thing that had happened to them.

Nevertheless, although only half comprehending what had actually occurred, they began to realize what that occurrence meant.  No matter where they might go over the whole face of the globe, they would always be aliens and strangers.  If they had been carried away to some unknown shore, some wilderness far from their own land, they might have thought of building ships to return to their homes.  They had seen New York vanish before their eyes, however.  They had seen their civilization disappear while they watched.

They were in a barbarous world.  There was not, for example, a single sulfur match on the whole earth except those in the runaway skyscraper.

IX.

Arthur and Van Deventer, in turn with the others of the cooler heads, thundered at the apathetic people, trying to waken them to the necessity for work.  They showered promises of inevitable return to modern times, they pledged their honor to the belief that a way would ultimately be found by which they would all yet find themselves safely back home again.

The people, however, had seen New York disintegrate, and Arthur’s explanation sounded like some wild dream of an imaginative novelist.  Not one person in all the gathering could actually realize that his home might yet be waiting for him, though at the same time he felt a pathetic anxiety for the welfare of its inmates.

Every one was in a turmoil of contradictory beliefs.  On the one hand they knew that all of New York could not be actually destroyed and replaced by a splendid forest in the space of a few hours, so the accident or catastrophe must have occurred to those in the tower, and on the other hand, they had seen all of New York vanish by bits and fragments, to be replaced by a smaller and dingier town, had beheld that replaced in turn, and at last had landed in the midst of this forest.