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moving about, breaking up camp and preparing to hike on. MacDonald breakfasted lightly and unsatisfyingly on some dried fruits and joined them without comment. His head hurt from the uncomfortable, restless night.
    Once more they trudged into the sunrise, Caesar in the lead, Virgil following eagerly, MacDonald beginning to show fatigue. The ground was rockier here, uneven and jagged. Several times he missed his footing and slipped. The apes were nimbler; they bounced from rock to rock.
    It wasn’t until he noticed the first twisted girders that MacDonald realized that it wasn’t rocks he was stumbling over. It was shattered concrete.
    He looked about him then, and with this new realization, saw that they had been walking through ruins for some time. As they moved up a low mound, he looked behind him and saw the shattered pattern of the city stretching out toward the distant horizon. He hadn’t even noticed. It faded out into the desert so gradually one had to know it was there in order to see it.
    They reached the top of the hill, and Caesar stopped in sudden shock. Virgil came up beside him, also startled. A moment later MacDonald joined them. His mouth fell open in horror. The three of them stared ahead in awe and amazement.
    “There it is,” said Caesar and then corrected himself. “Or was.”
    Virgil was solemn. “It looks like a storm at sea.” he murmured. “But solidified.”
    “It was done by a bomb from an armory one thousand times the size of yours,” said MacDonald.
    “There must not have been anybody to keep its owner’s conscience,” remarked Virgil.
    The three of them fell silent at that. They stood on the rise of ground and surveyed the nightmarish scene below.
    As far as they could see, stretching to the distant horizon, the landscape was a jumbled ruin. It was the total desolation of one of man’s great cities, and it lay in a shambles of twisted and melted girders and concrete, shattered automobiles, fallen buildings, and ruined highways. The destruction was total. The city was massive, silent, and utterly dead. A monument to madness. A tribute to the game of war. The ultimate playground for generals. And gorillas.
    The horrifying part of the scene was that it was also beautiful. There was a savage kind of color splashed across the land—reds and yellows and browns, streaked with blacks and whites in stark patterns. The texture of the desolation was brutally attractive, almost lovely in its roughness. It was too horrible to be real. And yet it was.
    MacDonald’s voice was shaky. “London, Rome, Athens, Rio, Moscow, Tokyo, Peking . . .”
    Virgil’s voice was firmer. “And Hell . . .”
    But Caesar was firmest. “That’s where we’re going.” He moved resolutely forward. The other two exchanged a glance and followed him down the hill and into the worst of the ruins.
    They clambered over surfaces that had been liquid for one brief but endless moment and then had become solid again. The city had not been blown apart—it had been melted, like a candle left out in the sun, but a sun a million times hotter and a million times closer.
    Glass, masonry, steel—all had been dissolved by the incredible temperature at the center of the bomb. Everything seemed to have a smooth surface; everything seemed fused together. The buildings and structures had crumpled and flowed into one another; the city was a single piece of undifferentiated slag, a mountain of glass with cars, buses, and other objects too melted to identify, sticking out of it, a glacier of savagery and hatred.
    MacDonald was thoroughly shaken by the horror around him. His eyes were moist, but his face was expressionless with horror. Even the two apes were ashen at the sight of so much destruction.
    The man’s mind churned with thoughts; half-remembered phrases came unbidden to him, descriptions out of Dante, Kafka, and Sade. Hell was too pale a term to describe what they were passing through.
    “My God,” he murmured. “My God.