and depressing enough in itself, but to know that they were alone
in a whole continent of savages and that there was not, indeed,
in all the world a single community of people they could greet as
brothers was terrifying.

Few of them thought so far, but there was actually--if Arthur's
estimate of several thousand years' drop back through time was
correct--there was actually no other group of English-speaking people
in the world. The English language was yet to be invented. Even
Rome, the synonym for antiquity of culture, might still be an
obscure village inhabited by a band of tatterdemalions under the
leadership of an upstart Romulus.

Soft in body as these people were, city-bred and unaccustomed to
face other than the most conventionalized emergencies of life, they
were terrified. Hardly one of them had even gone without a meal in
all his life. To have the prospect of having to earn their food,
not by the manipulation of figures in a book, or by expert juggling
of profits and prices, but by literal wresting of that food from its
source in the earth or stream was a really terrifying thing for them.

In addition, every one of them was bound to the life of modern
times by a hundred ties. Many of them had families, a thousand years
away. All had interests, engrossing interests, in modern New York.

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