Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 169: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

HE FELT VERY tired, but didn’t want to sleep, and willed himself back to alertness. There hadn’t been much chance to inspect the ruins, and he felt it would be appropriate to see them by moonlight. Rising into the air, he ghosted above roofs and trees until he came to the dead city. For a while he hovered in a sky like dark velvet, a faint breeze murmured around him, and he heard the remote noise of crickets and the sea. But stillness enveloped it all, there was no real sound. Sol City, capital of the legendary First Empire, had been enormous. It must have sprawled over forty or fifty thousand Square kilometers when it was in its prime, when it was the gay and wicked heart of human civilization and swollen with the lifeblood of the stars. And yet those who built it had been men of taste, they had sought out genius to create for them. The city was not a collection of buildings; it was a balanced whole, radiating from the mighty peaks of the central palace, through colonnades and parks and leaping Skyways, out to the temple-like villas of the rulers. For all’ its monstrous size, it had been a fairy sight, a woven lace of polished metal and white, black, red stone, colored plastic, music and light-everywhere light. Bombarded from space; sacked again and again by the barbarian hordes who swarmed maggot-like through the bones of the slain Empire; weathered, shaken by the slow Sliding of Earth’s crust; pried apart by patient, delicate roots; dug over . by hundreds of generations of archaeologists, treasure-seekers, the idly curious; made a quarry of metal and stone for the ignorant peasants who finally huddled about it—still its empty walls and blind windows, crumbling arches and toppled pillars held a ghost of beauty and magnificence which was like a_ half- remembered dream. A dream the whole race had once had. And now we’re waking up. Jorun moved silently over the ruins. Trees growing between tumbled blocks dappled them with moonlight and CORniclooo SS CO