With that sight a daze of horror settled upon Worley's brain. He was dimly aware that he was racing unsteadily northward from the park, through the darkened, silent streets, that from somewhere else behind him were coming other screams, the high screams of a woman, this time, and that from away across the waters to the east had come suddenly other faint, agonized cries. He heard as though from a great distance a sudden babel of shouts and screams that swept along the great city's edges like spreading flame, heard bells jangling suddenly out to add to that uproar. By then he had staggered eastward into the district of his own lodgings, moved by unconscious habit, but as he stumbled down one of those narrow streets eastward a sudden rising uproar a few blocks ahead of him brought him to a stand-still. Then, the first swirling mists of horror lifting from his brain, he stared down along the narrow street. Along its darkened length only circular patches of light at intersections were visible to him but now he saw, fleeing into those light-areas toward him, a growing mob of half-dressed people who were pouring from the bordering buildings into the street, running wildly with gesticulating hands and with hoarse cries of animal fear. Far down the street, almost to the waterfront eastward, Worley could see that growing mob pouring forth, fleeing toward him, and then he saw, too, what was behind them and what they fled from so wildly. For at the narrow street's eastern end there was rolling smoothly toward him, and after those fleeing figures, a great, glistening gray wave, waist-high, a gliding mass of gleaming jelly-stuff that stretched across the street's width and flowed effortlessly after the fugitives, great looping arms forming from it and reaching forth to draw them back into its glistening masses, that flowed smoothly onward with those fugitives' bodies in their grip! Remembrance of half-read newspaper articles flashed again over Worley's brain in that moment. "Protoplasm!" he cried, unconsciously, again. "Masses of it--and sweeping-up over all the city!" For in ever-increasing floods the gray, glistening masses of protoplasm were rolling forward, from the waters eastward; were surging through the narrow streets with that fear-crazed mob fleeing before them; were flowing swiftly and smoothly into buildings, from the interior of which came terrible shrieks; were shooting forth great tentacle-arms of their own jelly-like substance to catch and draw back the weeping little figures that fled before it. A mighty, mindless, brainless, nerveless monster, a great wave of living protoplasm that was sweeping-up and flowing through streets and buildings to lick them clean of all life! From southward, and from westward, were coming screams and cries as other great waves poured through the streets, as out over the doomed great city there poured from the waters about it that mighty tide of death!