Yet what I had seen was an infinitesimal part. Who can ever picture the smashing of those underground passages; the compression of steam and gases, ripping, tearing, heaving with one mighty lunge to rip the ocean bottom? An earthquake! Futile term! What have we who feel a trembling that shakes our buildings down, or opens a few cracks in the surface, ever experienced of the reality beneath? * * * * * That night of August 20 a giant rift must have opened in the floor of the Pacific. Certain it is that from that moment the oceans receded with ever-increasing rapidity. A hundred feet down on the 21st, more than that the next day; an accelerating drop as the volume of water grew less. There was no one to measure, to do more than guess at it from circling, groping aircraft gazing down at the green-black mist-clouds which hung over the new Lowlands. On the 21st of August, Dr. Plantet returned to Polly. They stayed there throughout August, September and well into October. Sixty days of world confusion. Ten years from now the chaotic events of those days may be sorted out for some patient chronicler to tell in a coherent fashion. I would not dare attempt it. But there were a few high lights which stand out clearly. The rainfall was abnormal, gradually lessening. High winds were everywhere reported. Volcanic activity was spasmodic and there were no other earthquakes. As though nature wanted to help struggling, panic-stricken mankind, artesian wells and all sources of fresh water save rainfall, were abnormally bountiful. The climate was changing, on the whole, growing far colder--and this, they said, was only temporary; the Polar seas were moving down with the rush of all the oceans into the emptying Pacific Basin. The oceans, down in the murky depths, were surging like rivers. The roar of them down there against the rocks of their lowering shore-fronts was like a giant waterfall heard everywhere in the world. The Lowlands were opening up, but great slow-moving cloud masses hung over them. The ocean surface down at the bottom was seldom seen. Heavy mists clung low--every day lower. Peaks began to show down in the abyss, new, sullen black mountain-tops, eroded into rounded domes, unreal to any earthly landscape. The mists clung to them like black veils. The foul rotting smell of the vapors, when the wind brought them up, caused disease; but daily the menace visibly lessened. The vapors clung low; soon they seldom rose from the distant, deepest Lowlands. They were not only low, but far away from our coast cities. The continental shelf was exposed for several hundred miles. Of the new realm, little could be seen save the downward slopes and the distant domelike peaks.