Vault of the Ages Read Online Free PDF Page B

their ancestors had to teach. “Come on,” he said swiftly, before he could have time to get really frightened. “Let’s go see.”
    “Maybe—” Tom licked his lips, then tossed his red head. “All right! I’m not scared either.”
    “Not much, anyway,” said Owl.
    They moved carefully through the grass-grown mounds of rubble, poking ahead with Tom’s spear in case of snakes, until they were at the rear of the old house. Then they stood for a long time staring at the mystery.
    It was a concrete block, about ten feet square and seven feet high, with a door of age-eaten bronze in the front. There were letters engraved in the gray cement above the door, and Carl spelled them slowly out:
    TIME VAULT
    “What’s a vault?” asked Tom.
    “It’s a place where you keep things,” said Carl.
    “But you can’t keep time,” said Owl. “Time’s not a thing. It’s a—well—it’s
time.
Days and years.”
    “That’s a very strong magic,” said Tom, his voice trembling a little. “Or else whoever made this was crazy. Let’s go.”
    “I wonder—that door—” Carl pushed against the heavy green metal. It creaked slowly open, and he saw concrete steps leading down into a great darkness.
    “You boys! Get away!”
    The boys whirled, and saw a witch-man standing just outside the pole. He held a drawn bow in his hands, the arrow pointing at them, and his angry face made it plain that he meant business.
    “Come out!” he shouted. “It’s forbidden!”
    Carl and his friends scrambled back, secretly a little glad to be ordered from the vault. “I’m sorry,” said Carl. “We didn’t know.”
    “If you weren’t guests, I’d kill you,” said the witch-man. “That place is taboo. It’s full of black magic.”
    “How do you know, if you can’t go in?” asked Owl impudently.
    “People have been in there,” spat the man. “It’s full of machines and books and things. The same black magic that brought the Doom. We don’t want it to get loose again.”
    He watched them go down the street and muttered charms against the devils in the vault.
    “I’m sorry,” said Ronwy, when the boys returned to his house in the evening. “My folk are afraid to deal with anyone till they seehow this war with the Lann comes out. I couldn’t convince them otherwise. And they said you could stay here only three more nights. If the enemy hasn’t given up by then, you’ll have to try sneaking past them.”
    Carl nodded absently, too full of the day’s discoveries to think of his own danger right away. He had to talk to someone, and Ronwy’s wise blue gaze invited faith.
    Carl spilled out the story of what he had seen and thought, and Ronwy tugged his white beard and smiled sadly.
    “I’ve spent my life reading the old histories and other books we’ve found, and thinking about them,” he said. “I believe I know what the Doom really was.”
    “There was a war,” said Tom eagerly.
    “Yes. The tribes—they called them nations—were much bigger then. This whole land, farther than any man has traveled today, was owned by one nation called America, and there were other lands too—some of them even across the sea. They had many wars and were very cruel, destroying whole cities from the air and laying the country waste. Finally, one great war ruined so many cities and machines, and killed so many people, that things couldn’t go on. There was plague and famine. By that time, too, so much of the land had been used up that people couldn’t go back to a simple life in the country, so many of them starved to death; and the others fought over what was left, bringing themselves still lower. Finally only a few remained and the land could feed them, so things got better after a while. But there were those who believed the old machines and powers had brought this evil to pass. If men hadn’t had machines that ran over the ground, and sailed, and flew, and destroyed, they wouldn’t have been able to hurt each other so