Then he saw Morton whirl sidewise from the guards who ran toward him, saw him leap toward the great switchboard and toward the wheel-switch at its center, felt himself thrust backward as his two opponents rushed back onto the mound with frantic cries. At the same moment the giant disk swept up again to the shaft's mouth, hanging there, crowded with massed lizard-men and a half-dozen of the huge tyrannosaurs. Out toward Morton leapt these gleaming-fanged monsters, and from a score of the lizard-men on the disk and on the mound there stabbed toward him rays of pallid light. But in the second before those deadly rays could be released Morton had grasped the great wheel, had spun it around in one frantic motion. The next moment the machine and Morton beside it had vanished in a flare of blinding flame, but even as they did so there came from far beneath a gigantic rumbling and crashing, a rending crash as of riven worlds, while the ground beneath Rowan swayed and rocked violently. The next moment there had burst up the shaft a vast gush of crimson fire, a molten flood bursting up from the suddenly released seas of molten fires below, annihilating the great disk that hovered in the shaft, raining in fiery death upon all on the mound, falling hissingly into the water and slime about Rowan. Then was another rumbling crash and the mound itself seemed to buckle, collapse, as the walls of the great shaft below it collapsed, and then before Rowan there lay only a vast, smoking gouge in the earth, with no sign of life in it. For minutes Rowan stared, unable to credit the miracle which had taken place before his eyes, which had thrust back the lizard-men and all their dinosaur hordes at the last moment, annihilating them in their cavern world far below by the switch they had themselves prepared, by the molten fiery seas of earth's heart which Morton's hand had loosed upon them. But for all the incredulous emotion within him he could find no words, could but stretch out his hands speechlessly toward the steaming pit before him. And then suddenly he became aware that he was weeping.... 7 It was hours later that Rowan stumbled at last out of the great swamp and westward across the rolling fields toward Brinton. Behind him the first pale light of dawn was welling up from beneath the horizon, and as he went on the fields about him lay misty and ghostlike beneath that increasing light. Then, as he came wearily to the crest of a little rise of ground, he paused, gazing ahead. Before him there lay in the distance the ruins of Brinton, a great mass of blackened wreckage in which was no sign of movement, and from which arose no sound of life. So silent was it, so wrapped round with the unutterable stillness and soundlessness of death, that it seemed to Rowan, standing there, that he must needs be the last living creature in the world, the last living man.