Did Estelle want to come down and watch? She did! She stood in the
main hallway as the excited and hopeful people trooped in. When
the last was inside the doors were firmly closed. The few friendly
Indians outside stared perplexedly at the mysterious white strangers.
The whites, laughing excitedly, began to wave to the Indians. Their
leave-taking was premature.
Estelle took her way down into the cellar. Arthur was awaiting her
arrival. Van Deventer stood near, with the grinning, grimy members
of Arthur's volunteer work gang. The massive concrete pile stood
in the center of the cellar. A big steam-boiler was coupled to a
tiny pipe that led into the heart of the mass of concrete. Arthur
was going to force the soapy liquid into the hollow pile by steam.
At a signal steam began to hiss in the boiler. Live steam from
the fire-room forced the soapy sirup out of the boiler, through
the small iron pipe, into the hollow that led to the geyser far
underground. Six thousand gallons in all were forced into the
opening in a space of three minutes.
Arthur's grimy gang began to work with desperate haste. Quickly
they withdrew the iron pipe and inserted a long steel plug,
painfully beaten from a bar of solid metal. Then, girding the
colossal concrete pile, ring after ring of metal was slipped on,
to hold the plug in place.
The last of the safeguards was hardly fastened firmly when Estelle
listened intently.
"I hear a rumbling!" she said quietly.
Arthur reached forward and put his hand on the mass of concrete.
"It is quivering!" he reported as quietly. "I think we'll be on
our way in a very little while."
The group broke for the stairs, to watch the panorama as the runaway
sky-scraper made its way back through the thousands of years to
the times that had built it for a monument to modern commerce.
Arthur and Estelle went high up in the tower. From the window of
Arthur's office they looked eagerly, and felt the slight quiver as
the tower got under way. Estelle looked up at the sun, and saw it
mend its pace toward the west.
Night fell. The evening sounds became high-pitched and shrill,
then seemed to cease altogether.
In a very little while there was light again, and the sun was
speeding across the sky. It sank hastily, and returned almost
immediately, _via_ the east. Its pace became a breakneck rush. Down
behind the hills and up in the east. Down in the west, up in the
east. Down and up-- The flickering began. The race back toward modern
times had started.
Arthur and Estelle stood at the window and looked out as the sun
rushed more and more rapidly across the sky until it became but a
streak of light, shifting first to the right and then to the left
as the seasons passed in their turn.
With Arthur's arms about her shoulders, Estelle stared out across
the unbelievable landscape, while the nights and days, the winters
and summers, and the storms and calms of a thousand years swept
past them into the irrevocable past.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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