The aerial battle-lines met! The winged monsters joined in mad conflict with the silver ships! It was a fierce struggle--a terrible scene! The plant-things swept to the attack, scores in number for each great ship. With desperate, incredible energy they wielded their gigantic clubs and spears; or, wheeling high above the silver vessels, dropped their missiles down upon them. And the swift searching fingers of purple flame reached out of the silver ships, to guide the thick, swirling vortexes of atomic disintegration. Under that terrible force of flowing green, the plant creatures turned red, battled on for a moment as they glowed with an awful scarlet radiance, and fell in a rain of crimson sparks that fast faded into nothingness! And ever the throbbing emerald column rising above the sea of ruby mist below us--the writhing serpentine bar of green that was the Lord of Flame--moved and twisted, directing its armies! The plants battled with desperate ferocity, with incredible strength! In ones and twos and threes, the silver vessels fell, in twisted, battered wreckage--fell among the showers of sparks from the vanished creatures that had crushed them! It was a battle of animal strength and courage, of desperate, savage energy--against deliberate, inhuman science! It was the battle of the mad, elemental beast--against silent, pitiless power! And the plants won! As the monsters that carried Sam and Xenora and myself swept along high above the line of battle, we saw the silver ships give way, saw them drop into the red mist, with the avenging, victorious plants following close upon them! And then my mine went off! A vast white cloud of smoke and shattered rock rose deliberately above the cliffs, spread into a Titanic mushroom shape, and fell in a great rain of débris into the abyss and into the lake. After many seconds the sound of it reached us--a crashing, deafening blast! The great wave of air swept up the green-winged fleet like leaves on a stormy lake! Below the cloud of smoke, where the black cliffs had been, I saw a vast white sheet of waters--a rushing Niagara multiplied manifold--plunging over the brink in a sheer and gleaming arc! Even as I gazed at it, in dazed wonder at the thing I had wrought, Sam was suddenly close beside me, shouting something with alarm and urgent command in his voice. "Mel--the roof! Where is the Omnimobile? For God's sake----" "In a crater in the abyss, by the metal cylinder," I cried, wondering. Then I looked up, and saw that the flat roof was cupping up, like a vast inverted basin! The waters above were rising! With no further word to me, Sam shouted a strange order to the monsters we rode. Their vast green wings were folded! We dropped like plummets into the crimson mist! The violet gleam appeared, and we made out the crater-pitted floor. I shouted directions, and in a few minutes we settled into the same little crater in which I had met disaster.