The man is unscathed, but the woman sustains a wound to her leg, which they wrap with a flag brought from when they were creating the sand castle. While there, the man is attacked by a big cat, which the woman routs with a piece of wood. They climb up and eventually reach a small abandoned house. After contemplating it, they decide to discover what the mountains are like. While resting at a miniature river, the woman discovers that they are on the cliff of a large waterfall. Further on, they hear chirping in a tree, and pause briefly to observe a bird and its chick in a nest. While climbing a small hill, the man sees a snake and tumbles down on the woman. They find a decrepit boat they could use to cross the river, but continue up into the mountains. Later, they find another campsite and massive, oddly shaped trees with markings on one. While resting under a tree, the man finds the remains of a campsite, discovering that the area they were in had been inhabited.

The two journey out, finding a river that they were unaware of the couple follow the river and make observations as they go. As they leave, the frames slowly fade to white, as the rising water begins to destroy the castle. After construction is completed, and after temporarily stopping the sea from eroding the castle away, the two decide to go on a journey to discover the cause behind the rising sea level.

The woman notes that the sea (visible on the right side of the frame) is rising. 'Time' begins with two stick figures, a woman and a man, building a sand castle complex on a beach. In 2014, it won the Hugo Award in the Best Graphic Story category. Described by Glen Tickle of Geekosystem as Munroe's ' magnum opus', 'Time' attracted significant attention and was well received online several projects, wikis and web communities were built about it. By the end of the story, the characters return home to save their people. The strip's story, set 11,000 years in the future in the basin of the Mediterranean Sea during a supposed recurrence of the Zanclean flood, features two characters journeying uphill to discover where the rising water is originating. Each image represented a single frame in a larger story. Beginning with a single frame published at midnight on March 25, 2013, the image was updated every 30 minutes until March 30, 2013, and then every hour for 118 days (123 days in total), ending on July 26 with a total of 3,102 unique images. ' Time' is the 1,190th strip of Randall Munroe's webcomic xkcd.

Randall munroe comics