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Chapter 5

As we entered deeper into what had once been the city, the evidences of man's

past occupancy became more frequent. For a mile from the arch there was only a

riot of weeds and undergrowth and trees covering small mounds and little

hillocks that, I was sure, were formed of the ruins of stately buildings of the dead

past.

But presently we came upon a district where shattered walls still raised their

crumbling tops in sad silence above the grass-grown sepulchers of their fallen

fellows. Softened and mellowed by ancient ivy stood these sentinels of sorrow,

their scarred faces still revealing the rents and gashes of shrapnel and of bomb.

Contrary to our expectations, we found little indication that lions in any great

numbers laired in this part of ancient London. Well-worn pathways, molded by

padded paws, led through the cavernous windows or doorways of a few of the

ruins we passed, and once we saw the savage face of a great, black-maned lion

scowling down upon us from a shattered stone balcony.

We followed down the bank of the Thames after we came upon it. I was anxious

to look with my own eyes upon the famous bridge, and I guessed, too, that the

river would lead me into the part of London where stood Westminster Abbey and

the Tower.

Realizing that the section through which we had been passing was doubtless

outlying, and therefore not so built up with large structures as the more centrally

located part of the old town, I felt sure that farther down the river I should find

the ruins larger. The bridge would be there in part, at least, and so would remain

the walls of many of the great edifices of the past. There would be no such

complete ruin of large structures as I had seen among the smaller buildings.

But when I had come to that part of the city which I judged to have contained the

relics I sought I found havoc that had been wrought there even greater than

elsewhere.

At one point upon the bosom of the Thames there rises a few feet above the water

a single, disintegrating mound of masonry. Opposite it, upon either bank of the

river, are tumbled piles of ruins overgrown with vegetation.

These, I am forced to believe, are all that remain of London Bridge, for nowhere

else along the river is there any other slightest sign of pier or abutment.

The Lost Continent