The sun was above the eastern horizon; the sky was an inverted bowl of blood. Beneath the plane Fahn's figure, standing beside his projector, showed clear-cut against the black rock under him. At the base of the cavern mountain Noths had appeared with apparatus. They were adjusting it hurriedly. A blue-white flash from Fahn's projector spat downward across the six hundred feet and into the crater mouth. Thunder rolled out. Another flash, another--until they became almost continuous. Far down in the earth within the crater, the slumbering forces began to answer. A rumbling sounded--a low, ominous muttering, pregnant with infinite power. Steam hissed upward; a puff of smoke.... The plane had been ascending rapidly; it was thousands of feet up now. Fahn's thunderbolts persisted, and at last the angered fires of the earth were unleashed. The mountain seemed to split apart; the report was deafening; flaming gases, cinders and ashes were hurled upward and outward. The main force of the explosion was sidewise toward the city, but even so the plane barely avoided the torrent of molten rock and blazing gas that mounted from below. The city was engulfed in flames over which a heavy smoke hung like a pall. A tremendous lake of viscous liquid fire lay where the peaks and the cavern once had been. The earth was rumbling, shaking, splitting apart. The scene was vague--dulled by a lurid red glare that struggled with the blackness of the smoke. A moment, and a rift appeared. The smoke seemed to part, roll aside. Through the rift, the burning city showed for an instant clear and distinct--the crowded city in which no single human or beast could have remained alive. Still not content, the earth was heaving over the whole western end of the island. And from the sea a great tidal wave came rolling up over the sinking land, hissing, quenching the fires, obscuring everything in a cloud of steam. Like a mist, the steam presently dissipated. The turgid waters lashed themselves into furious waves that gradually were stilled. And then it was daylight, sullen red day, with only the wreckage on the waters--charred fragments of bodies, thousands of them floating for miles around--mute evidence of what had gone before. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Once again the plane hung like a shimmering ghost above the towering piles of steel and masonry--New York City at the peak of its civilization. For Azeela and Dee, it had been a brief trip of awe and wonder; a trip northward through space and back through time. After the cataclysm, they had stayed but a week back in Anglese City. The entire western end of the island had sunk into the gulf, carrying Toroh and his Noths and the Arans and their King to destruction. In Anglese City a new government was formed--a democracy of the Bas, with Mogruud at its head.