It was terribly still and empty--this piled wilderness.
He turned and hurried into his little glass-sided house and shut the door behind him.

A red beam of the sinking sun shone in and laid a bar of light across the chart like a grin.
The silence was terrible.

The emptiness pressed upon him like a weight that crushed from him his youth and his strength and all his youthful optimism, and left him old and weak and faded, a shadow of humanity like those shadows down there in the canyon.
Stealthily, as if he were afraid of some tangible shape reaching out of the silence, his hand went to the telephone receiver.

He clutched it as drowning fingers clutch at seaweed.

He leaned and jerked the receiver to his ear, and waited for the human voice that would bring him once more into the world of men.