I have been writing here in this silent room for a time, whose length
I cannot guess. Westward, though, the sun is touching the horizon, its
level rays searching through this room, over the great projector and
over Ferson and Grant, lying silent before me.
My life is ebbing swiftly from me with each passing minute, yet with
the age-old instinct of man strong in me I have striven thus to leave a
record of the great change, that men of the future in some far day may
read.
Men of the future! For there will be such, there must be such. The
upward surge of evolutionary progress that has been interrupted, set
back, here on earth begins again its slow upward climb with the halting
of this projector, the coming again of the evolution vibrations that
are now playing on earth again. Beneath me, in the silent city, there
swarm the ape-like hordes that were once humanity, but through the
coming ages they will climb up again through troglodyte and savage
barbarian to man!
And it is for those men of the far future that I have written with
my last strength these words, as a record and a warning that I shall
enclose in the steel box beside me.
A warning that their civilization be never cast back from man to
brute as ours has been. And if God send that they heed that warning,
none among them ever shall die as I die now, the last man of all men,
looking down through the sunset into the familiar but infinitely
strange city, where roam the hordes that once were men. Sunset! Sunset
for our civilization, our races, as for the earth. But, dying, I know
that after their passing there must come with the slow upward climb of
evolution new races, new civilizations, as surely as after sunset and
night must come the----