Western Australia
It was in the morning as he was gathering up his bedroll that he noticed the hinges beneath him. In a moment he uncovered a latch and a cloud of dust flew up in his face as he disturbed the air of the cellar. It settled in a minute. He peered down where the daylight penetrated. There appeared to be a small room, perhaps twelve by twelve feet. The dim forms of boxes overflowing with objects littered the floor. Most perceptible, directly below him, was a wooden stepladder and a chair and an old desk against the nearest wall. Upon the desk there seemed to be scattered papers and a lamp, all thickly covered with dust.
He realized right away that the cellar was unclean, full of contraband and criminal to enter. From its isolation it must have been overlooked by the rovers who made it their mission to rid the world of the evil relics that polluted and plagued the past. He had never come across such a treasure before. Sure he had found stray articles, and scraps and debris of the former age that still washed up along beaches, but never an untouched room, as now lay before his eyes.
But in that first fit of excitement he focused all his thoughts to using this discovery for his pet project, viz., of doing himself in. His life had been so filled with misery and loss and half-imaginary persecution that he had, over the years, fallen into the bad habit of nursing a resentment towards his own continued existence. He knew himself to be incapable of ending his life directly, by his own hand. So he often played tricks in his mind of devising ways of making it necessary for someone else to do the job. Such roundabout ploys had backfired in the past. But here he immediately saw the potential for another suicide scheme.
So without hesitation he descended the creaking steps, found the pen and paper he expected, scribbled his mad note and left, putting the room and all its contents out of mind until his plan burst like the bubble that it was.
Now he would revisit this cellar with a better purpose. In the late afternoon he spotted the familiar line of hills from another hilltop. He camped in the valley before him to reach his destination early the next day. He didn’t want to reach it that night. He felt the thrill of a boy again ready to explore a new place or open some present, and he wanted to do that the moment he got there.
Next morning he was again setting foot on the creaky ladder. The dim light from the hatch poured into a dust-filled room. He tried not to unsettle it too much and stood motionless while his eyes adjusted to the dark. In a state of tingling excitement his eyes focused and then discerned the objects of his heart's desire. In several piles in one corner of the floor, and then along some low shelves behind the steps were ranged rows of books. It annoyed him that he’d failed to notice them before.
He went to the shelves and handled one greedily. A fog of dust flew up and made him cough. He carried them up by the armload and deposited them in stacks in the open air. He took up everything he could find, the lamp, the papers on the desk, the contents of its drawers. He found a few boxes of items besides this, shoes and rotting clothes and then a large cupboard full of canned food, but he didn’t bother with that for now.
Without much trouble he deduced this must have been both a storage room and a study for some long-gone settler. It was probably dug into the hillside as a cool retreat from the midday sun. It must have been the first thing built; the desk couldn’t have passed through the narrow hatchway. Then the house was built on top of it, pretty much obscuring it from notice. "There might be quite a few of these overlooked caches scattered about," he thought, "good news for mankind, and for me."
He went back up the steps to examine his treasures. As he raised his head above the flooring, what a feast greeted his eyes! There were colors there, the whole spectrum in the faded reds and blues and yellows of the book covers. He hadn’t seen such a glow of colors in almost thirty years, harmless colors.
For a while he merely fingered the books, dumbstruck, sitting between the stacks of them. Then he began going over the titles and sorting them in separate piles by subject. The majority were books about husbandry, veterinary works and agriculture. A few contained old plates whose colors were still fresh and striking. His eyes lingered over these a long time. There was one that especially detained him. It was a picture of several black and white cows grazing on the greenest pastures of grass. In the background stood a trim, red barn, above which stretched an azure sky flecked with innocent clouds. At the bottom of the picture the inscription read: "Dairy farming in New England".
Besides this there was a stack of cheap novels, obscure and dated things. But in the pile of twenty or so there were also a few good ones, a Steinbeck and a Hemingway. There were some schoolbooks of math and science, an English reader and a high school history which he singled out. Finally there were two far greater finds, as far as Jonathan was concerned. The first was an atlas of the world, with color plates, circa 1980, and all the names of the now nameless places. The second was a single volume of Toynbee, half of his abridged "Study of History", a valuable thesaurus of mankind's mistakes and achievements, spanning most of recorded time. "With this" he thought as he took it up, "I can pass my days. I could spend years filling up its outline from what I remember, and slowly restore a great part of history."
