During September the organized aircraft of several nations were regularly cruising over the Pacific Basin. The Lowlands of the Pacific, they now were being called. An enemy might be down there. The planes carried image-finders; the public at its mirrors, gazed upon the strange scene. The planes seldom flew lower than the former sea-level. Rolling dark, heavy clouds lay beneath them. Rounded peaks; eroded mountain ridges. And sometimes the sea would show. Broken now into bowl-like areas, which if they had not drained would have been new, small land-locked oceans. Giant waterfalls, tumbling over great ridges; wide, swift-flowing rivers, draining off to be dry valleys within a week. It was all so constantly changing. What an observer saw to-day, was unrecognizable to-morrow. There were many tales of dying things of the sea, lying trapped on the rocky slopes--dying, rotting. And occasionally a broken surface vessel of by-gone days, exposed in its grave as the water left it. There was no sign of an enemy, until September 30th. And that day the civilized world of the Highlands rang with the news. * * * * * The oceans were down some eight or ten thousand feet now. No one could measure the exact level. Oceans? The word had lost its meaning. There was no body of water left of any great extent. The realm of the Lowlands was an actuality. Far down among the black mists water often was seen. Lakes perched in mountain caldrons. Giant waterfalls; tumbling rivers; cañons, some dry, some filled with tumultuous water; domes rearing their rounded heads into the heavy clouds; domes, lower, isolated at the water level; great trenches filled with moving water; ridges, like mountain chains standing aloft. Strange, black new realm. Its main configurations were beginning to take form. The great ridges of the Atlantic Basin were showing. The huge central basin of the Pacific lay like a dark inland sea. The great deeps were still all unbroken water. On September 30, a plane was passing over the Micronesia section of the Pacific Lowlands, scouting the tumbled abyss down there, the precipitous slopes from the ridges and domes down to the water-filled caldrons and trenches. The exact latitude and longitude were not given by the discoverer. The report said: “Micronesia, north of the Caroline Mountain-tops.” Seen vaguely through a rolling cloud mass was what might have been a plateau, with mountain ridges around it. The plane was flying at about our Continental level, the former sea-level. They were calling it now the Zero-height; and in the new technical language this plateau was down in the Lowlands at minus ten thousand feet.