The night of August 20-21 was still, soundless, save from far down where the ocean rollers were pounding. It was a heavy, oppressive night; dark, with sullen, green-black clouds. From the veranda there seemed to Polly only a dark void stretching out over the falling ocean, two hundred feet below her--a void of sullen black mist. A green-black murk hung down there with the water level hidden beneath it. The aspect of a vanished ocean had never been so obvious. Here on the Maine coast Polly stood gazing out toward Spain. It came upon her then: she was standing upon a great height--our whole continental coast was the summit of a gigantic rise. Spain was off there beyond the horizon, standing similarly on a height. And between them was a dark void, an abyss filled now with noisome clouds. But when the clouds lifted? Polly could envisage then the new lands rolling down there in the abyss between her and Spain. The lands of the depths. New mountains whose highest peaks were lower than her feet. New plains, new valleys--a whole new realm added to our world. Some day, when the air down there was purged and the ooze and mud and rotting sea-organisms were dried, and cleansed by the blessed sunlight, what fertile land would be given mankind! What mines of metal and precious stones might be found! Villages would spring up. Agriculture, industry would begin down there. Our world of the earth’s surface, suddenly made five times larger. The world of the Lowlands, added to the Highlands which were all we had before. She envisaged the Bermudas tiny mountain peaks towering alone out of the Lowlands toward the sky. And the Azores--and southward, all the little fairy mountain-tops which once we had called the islands of the Caribbean. Fearsome, but romantic cataclysm to bring so suddenly this change! That sullen night of August 20-21 passed, to Polly, without incident. But at dawn she was awakened; the newscaster’s voice was blaring. She crowded, with the frightened servants of the household, before the sound-grid. An earthquake had occurred somewhere under the Pacific Ocean. Two tidal waves had flung from it. The Asiatic and American coasts, even with the ocean level down two hundred feet, were inundated. Thousands dead and homeless. From the Pacific islands meager reports were coming. Many islands had been swept end to end by the wave. The great volcanos of the Hawaiians were in violent eruption. But in an hour’s time they were quiet again. The tidal waves dashed themselves out. Death and destruction raged for an hour over thousands of miles of seacoast. An earthquake under the ocean; tidal waves spent and gone; volcanos active, then still. But down there underground, I had seen the cause of all this, had seen a realm and a nation doomed and destroyed.