But at last, upon the eighth day after the break of Connell and Macklin, and the second day before our approaching doom, there came an event which roused us suddenly from that renewed apathy into which we had fallen. For days we had noticed that the crowds in the streets were proving fewer and fewer, the only people now remaining being groups of green-uniformed officials unceasingly moving in and out of the headquarters there. There was finally made clear to us the reason of their activities. For, as we gazed forth from our window on the afternoon of that day, we seemed to sense a certain air of anticipation in the people that remained. They swarmed forth into the great air-city's streets; we heard in a moment more a strange great hissing from far below us, all around the city's base and edge; and then were aware that with that hissing sound and with a great tremor of power that beat through all its colossal metal mass, the great air-city was moving! Was moving not slowly and majestically as air-cities commonly move, but was leaping forward through the air with sudden tremendous speed. We knew now that most of the city's population had been removed to the ground and the movement toward the west had started. Now came excited roars from the crowds beneath, as the giant mass that was Berlin leapt forward, and now as Hilliard and I leaned from our window with an excitement almost as great we caught our breaths. For we could see now, from the cloud-masses that lay beneath in the distance, that the great air-city was cleaving the air at a speed that was rapidly mounting to over a hundred miles an hour. Terrific winds were whirling all about our power-tower, as it shot through the atmosphere, and those same winds sweeping with titanic force through the city's streets and about its towers forced the crowds in those streets swiftly within the shelter of the structures. And still at ever-mounting speed, the hissing of power and the tremendous roar of winds increasing still, the mighty air-city was whirling on, its soaring towers of metal swaying back beneath the awful winds of their progress, whipping through high cloud-banks and out into clear air again, giving us flashing glimpses from our own wind-swept window of the ground far outward and beneath flashing back at immense speed as we shot onward, as all the colossal city sped on, at a velocity that I knew by then must be over a hundred and fifty miles an hour!