We were now about two miles above the earth. The aeromat checked its forward progress and began to descend perpendicularly with an easy fluttering of its circular wings. I craned forward eagerly, my brain thrilling at the thought of the immensity of the great city I was now to witness after two hundred and fifty years. By now New York must have a population of thirty or forty millions, skyscrapers reaching a mile into the air, hanging gardens in the skies, with superimposed layers of activity. “I should like to fly around Manhattan--as low as possible. Could this be done?” “Nothing easier.” I craned out of the window eagerly and immediately recognized the familiar configuration of the landscape, Long Island and the thin tongue of Manhattan. We descended rapidly and my perplexity increased. Instead of the towering skyline of lower Broadway, I seemed to distinguish the spreading green of wooded lawns. “But New York?” “There is New York.” “But the buildings, the skyscrapers, the millions.” “Skyscrapers? What a funny name.” I looked at Acquilla in blank stupor. “Then New York is gone too?” She reflected a moment. “You are talking of things that happened a long while ago. I keep forgetting that you lived in the age of materialism. New York, of course, was completely destroyed for the first time in 1984 and resettled only a hundred years ago.” “Wait.” I grasped her arm excitedly and gazed out. We were now perhaps two hundred feet above what was old Staten Island.--Before me the island of Manhattan rose distinctly, at least one hundred and fifty feet above water level. “But it’s, it’s Gibraltar,” I gasped. “What seems so changed to you, Bogardus?” I continued to gaze at the great promontory with its villas and parks, its terraced descents to the water and but for the fact that from above I had unmistakably recognized the topography, I should have refused the evidence of my own eyes. Acquilla repeated the question. “Changed? Everything. Not only has a city of ten million inhabitants disappeared--buildings that rose a thousand feet into the air--but something has happened to the ground itself. The New York that I knew was a low flat island. What has happened? A volcanic disturbance?”