Cemetery World by Clifford D. Simak Page A

long time, and like all the rest, had ignored it. There were many others who knew of its existence and accepted that existence as they would the existence of a tree or boulder. There was nothing to recommend it, nothing at all. Perhaps I would never have thought of it except in passing, or would never have visited it if it had not been for a gradual sharpening of my concern for olden things. Can you understand what I’m saying?”
    “I think,” I said, “I understand it far better than you may suspect. I recognize the symptoms. I have suffered most acutely from them.”
    “I went there,” she said, “and I ran my hands along the old, roughly hewn stones and I thought of how human hands, long gone in dust, had shaped them and piled them atop another as a refuge against the night and storm, as a home on a newfound planet. Looking through the ancient eyes of the builders, I was able to understand the attraction of the place of building, knowing why they might have chosen this particular place for the building of a house. Protection of the canyon walls from the sweeping winds, the quiet and dramatic beauty of the place, the water from the spring that still ran in a trickle from underneath a hillside rock, the wide and fertile valley (no longer fertile now) spreading just beyond the doorstep. I stood there in their stead and felt as they would have felt. I was, for a moment, them. And it didn’t really matter whether they were Lansings or not; they were people, they were the human race.
    “I would have been richly repaid for my time in going there if I had walked away right then. The touching of the stone, the evidence of the past would have been quite enough, but I went into the house …”
    She stopped and waited a moment, as if gathering herself for the telling of the rest of it.
    “I went into the house,” she said, “and it was a foolhardy thing to do, for at any moment a part of it might have come crashing down upon me. Some of the stones were balanced most precariously and the entire thing was unstable. I don’t remember that at the time, however, I gave any thought to this. I walked softly, not because of any danger, but because of the sanctity of time that hovered in that space. It was strange, the feeling that I had—or, rather, the conflicting feelings. When I first went into it I felt that I was an invader, an outsider who had no right of being there. I was intruding on old memories, on old lives, on old emotions that should have been left alone in peace, that had been there so long that they had earned the right to be left alone. I went inside, into what had been a rather large room, perhaps what you might call a living room. There was thick dust upon the floor and the dust was marked by the tracks of wild and small things and there was the odour of wild things having lived there through millennia. Insects had spun webs of silk in the corners and some of the older webs were as dusty as the floor. But as I stood there, just inside the doorway, a strange thing happened—a feeling that I had the right to be there, that I belonged there, that I was coming back after a long, long time on a family visit and was a welcome visitor. For blood of my blood had lived there, bone of my bone, and the right of blood and bone is not erased by time. There was a fireplace in one corner. The chimney was gone, fallen long before, but the fireplace’s remained. I walked over to it and, kneeling down, touched the hearthstone with my fingers, feeling the texture of its surface through the dust. I could see the fireplace’s blackened throat, blackened by the old home fires; the soot—still there, resisting time and weather, and there was a moment when it seemed I could see the piled logs and the flame. And I said—I don’t know if I said it aloud or only in my mind—I said it is all right, I have come back to tell you; the Lansings still persist. Never for a moment confused as to whom I might be saying it. I waited for