From the port in his cabin he, too, had seen the new land that lay ahead. He strode by the group on the forward deck, but his eyes were not for them. Ever watchful, Zenas Wright noted that the mien of the stranger was curiously excited. His blue eyes gleamed. His lips were parted. Something seemed deeply to concern him. He stood at the rail and studied the looming coastline long and searchingly. In his face was the rapt expression of the man who greets again a well-loved friend after an absence of many days. From the shore he turned his eyes to the sea and scrutinized it keenly. Zenas Wright, watching, started. What was the man about? Was he signaling? And whom? The explorer took a hasty step toward the rail to investigate. Beneath his feet he felt the deck of the cruiser heave like the breast of an unquiet sleeper. A terrific roar burst from the bowels of the ship, and she quivered in every plate of steel and oaken beam. "The magazine!" cried Everson. The commander dashed for the companionway, but he never reached it. Amidships the decks heaved up and opened in a yawning wound that rent the cruiser almost from rail to rail. Through the gap shot skyward an immense column of smoke, laced with spurts of flame, and spread fanwise many feet in the air. With it there ascended a mass of débris torn from the vitals of the ship. For yards around the waves splashed to the fall of the splintered wreckage. The swaying decks were littered with it. And some of the fragments were of steel and iron that clanged as they fell, and others were horrible shreds of men, and made no clangor. Paralyzed in his tracks, his eyes distended, his very flesh stirring from his bones at the horror of it, Everson faced the wraith of ruin that arose in his path. A new manifestation tore speech from his lips. "Look!" he shouted aloud in a strained and unnatural voice. "My God, look! _The color!_" In the heart and center of the standing column of smoke, seen faintly at first and then in blazing brilliance, towered a mighty pillar of light. But it was not like any light that any of those who gazed upon it had ever known. For it was neither of red nor white, nor yet of violet, yellow, or green, or any other color or hue of the solar spectrum. Radiant, scintillant, indescribably beautiful, it thrust up through the murk of disaster steadily and cruelly as the flaming sword of an unkind fate. It was this that had pierced the ship and exploded the magazine. Zenas Wright, who had looked unshaken on many strange things, looked upon this and cried out, even as had Everson: "The color! A new color! Impossible; yet it _is_!" With chaos and death linked together and roaring in front of him, the old man, true scientist to the last, bent his eyes on the flaming pillar in a challenging and analytical stare. If this was to be his final vision, why, he would learn what he might from it before he went into the shadow where all learning is valueless.