The tunnel rose steeply. For just a moment at a turn, we stood looking back. A muttering, screaming, hissing abyss of red glare--steam and smoke and mingled water and fire, breaking down all its distant walls, an inconceivable torrent, filling this abyss, smothering these fires, crushing these passages. Rushing thousands of miles--smashing and roaring to find new levels. We rounded the corner--struggled and stumbled on upward through the dark tunnel. CHAPTER XXI. THE WHITE AËRO ATTACKS. It had been the night of August 15, 1991, when I stood at Park Circle 80, in New York, and saw the news bulletins that the tides again were falling. The days that followed were for our world the strangest, most fearsome of its recorded history, comparable to nothing within our ken. Yet we know so little of the lifetime of our earth. A few centuries out of millions! We look at our maps; we say: “This is the land and this, the water. This is the way things are.” We feel instinctively that it was always so. But it was not. The events of August, September, and October of 1991 are history now. I cannot detail them; cannot crowd into a few paragraphs the chronicle of more than an infinitesimal fraction of what really occurred. The tides, for a few days after August 15 were off a fathom or so each twenty-four hours. It brought, in all the interwoven affairs of our nations, a sudden stoppage of all human activity, a panicky confusion. But that was soon over. Human endeavor must go on; without it, we die. Transportation must proceed. Food must come daily to all the great population centers. Without transportation, in forty-eight hours New York City would be starving. They say now that had 1991 not been the age of the air, the world could not have survived. Doubtless it is so. The oceans had come naturally into disuse, and air transportation, even over our great land areas, was already supreme. Storms swept the world on August 16. Volcanic activity began. From every part of the earth’s surface came reports of nature disturbed. The news tapes were crowded, and with the disorganization of industry, the newscasters proved inadequate. There were days when even government officials were scarcely aware of the terrible events transpiring. Dr. Plantet was summoned to Washington. He found there a harassed government in utter chaos. A million abnormal things to be done at once--a million unprecedented problems requiring instant solution, with the safety of our people hanging in the balance. The panic must be allayed. All work, all human endeavor must cease, save those things which were vital.