These were terrible moments for the people of Ember. So now and then the lights would flicker and go out. The city of Ember was old, and everything in it, including the power lines, was in need of repair.
Sometimes darkness fell in the middle of the day. When the lights were off, as they were between nine at night and six in the morning, the city was so dark that people might as well have been wearing blindfolds. When the lights were on, they cast a yellowish glow over the streets people walking by threw long shadows that shortened and then stretched out again. The only light came from great flood lamps mounted on the buildings and at the tops of poles in the middle of the larger squares. In the city of Ember, the sky was always dark. There it sat, unnoticed, year after year, until its time arrived, and the lock quietly clicked open. The box ended up at the back of a closet, shoved behind some old bags and bundles. And before he could return the box to its official hiding place or tell his successor about it, he died. All he managed to do was dent the lid a little. He took it from its hiding place in the basement of the Gathering Hall and brought it home with him, where he attacked it with a hammer.īut his strength was failing by then. He was ill-he had the coughing sickness that was common in the city then-and he thought the box might hold a secret that would save his life. But the seventh mayor of Ember was less honorable than the ones who’d come before him, and more desperate. When she grew old, and her time as mayor was up, she explained about the box to her successor, who also kept the secret carefully, as did the next mayor. So the first mayor of Ember was given the box, told to guard it carefully, and solemnly sworn to secrecy. There may be no one left in the city by then or no safe place for them to come back to.” “What else can we do?” asked the chief builder. “So the first mayor will pass the box to the next mayor, and that one to the next, and so on down through the years, all of them keeping it secret, all that time?” “No, just that it’s information they won’t need and must not see until the box opens of its own accord.” “And will we tell the mayor what’s in the box?” the assistant asked.
“We’ll put them in a box with a timed lock, set to open on the proper date.” “The mayor of the city will keep the instructions,” said the chief builder. “But who will keep the instructions? Who can we trust to keep them safe and secret all that time?” “We’ll provide them with instructions, of course,” the chief builder replied. “And when the time comes,” said the assistant, “how will they know what to do?” “Is that long enough?” asked his assistant. “They must not leave the city for at least two hundred years,” said the chief builder. Urn:oclc:763152673 Scandate 20090825171420 Scanner scribe6.la.archive.When the city of Ember was just built and not yet inhabited, the chief builder and the assistant builder, both of them weary, sat down to speak of the future. OL15136066W Page-progression lr Page_number_confidence 89.38 Pages 296 Ppi 400 Related-external-id urn:isbn:143951870X Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 00:58:07 Boxid IA100809 Boxid_2 CH112801 Camera Canon 5D City New York DonorĪlibris Edition 1st ed.
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