 Why does the author focus on the water returning to smoothness after Ned's wreck?
THE ETERNAL WALL By RAYMOND Z. GALLUN A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... His old car rattled and roared as he swung it recklessly around Pit Bend. Another car leaped suddenly into view, its lights glaring blindingly past a high, up-jutting mass of Jurassic rock at the turn of the road. Dazzled, and befuddled by his own rash speed, Ned Vince had only swift young reflexes to rely on to avoid a fearful, telescoping collision. He flicked his wheel smoothly to the right; but the County Highway Commission hadn't yet tarred the traffic-loosened gravel at the Bend. His car hit the white-painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through, tumbled down a steep slope, struck a huge boulder, bounced up a little, and arced outward, falling as gracefully as a swan-diver toward the inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet beneath.... Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black, quiet pool geysered around him in a mighty splash. Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. Nothing that he could imagine could mean doom more certainly than this. The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of white—for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, was surcharged with alkali. As that heavy, natronous liquid rushed up through the openings and cracks beneath his feet, Ned Vince knew that his friends and his family would never see his body again, lost beyond recovery in this abyss. The welt, left by the blow he had received on his forehead, put a thickening mist over his brain, so that he could not think clearly. Presently, when he could no longer hold his breath, bitter liquid was sucked into his lungs. The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father of Change, seemed to wait.... Lacking qualities identifiable as human, the disturbance was still like the babble of a group of workmen who have discovered something remarkable. The desolate expanse around the gulch, was all but without motion. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that.
 To demonstrate how time and progress move forward, without taking pause for the loss of a single or entire society
 To demonstrate how time and progress move forward, without taking pause for the loss of a single or entire society  To depict the difference between a 20th century moment and the future, when water has vanished from the continent  To illustrate the biological effects of alkali on the composition of the human body  To personify the all-consuming effects of nostalgia and fear in the last moments of a human's brief life