Smithby could never forget his mission; our snapping sender flashed out the image to be caught and relayed over the world. Hundreds of millions of people everywhere sat tense at their mirrors watching the silent red scene. Rainbow of blood-light falling upon the dark Moon Mountain ridge. A great round pool glowing at the end of the rainbow. The mountains were melting; as though they were molds of black and white wax under the heat of a pressure torch, they melted. The rainbow end moved over, slowly traveling along the ridge, melting it away--wax fuming, bubbling and plowing in lava streams down the slopes. The nearer end of the ridge where first the blood-light had struck was a depression now--a great caldron where the ridge had been; a caldron of fused molten rock, viscous, cooling from yellow-red to red and then to black. Along the whole length of the ridge the blood-red rainbow sprayed its penetrating heat. A silent, red inferno. And presently there were dim muffled sounds as underground gases exploded; and the hiss of the licking gas flames. We could feel the heat. The glare rose and painted all the sky with blood. Abruptly the crimson rainbow was gone. The Moon ridge shad vanished into a boiling trench of lava, topped by hungry licking red-green tongues of flame, with a huge black gas-cloud, rolling up. The fires cooled and died. The red turned slowly black. The trench lay naked and dead in the moonlight--fused rock cooling into shapes fantastic. A dead, empty trench with a gray mantle of ashes sifting down upon it, to mark where the Gians had been. CHAPTER XXV. MURMURING RIVER. They call this now the era of our Greater World. This year that has passed has brought us many strange things. I am not one to recount them--the wonders of the Lowlands, the world’s changed climate; the struggles, the reorganization, it seems, of everything which we held to be standard. There is still chaos. I could not, with authority or understanding, write of it. I have told the rôles which I and my friends had forced upon us, that is all. For those many omissions which would have made my narrative more logically clear, I ask indulgence. Books, in future years, will be written upon many angles of the subject. The science of those two races who with enmity and smoldering strife lived in the depths of our great earth--our scientists will attempt to picture it. But that will be futile, no doubt. The Middge have gone. From that very night when their crimson rainbow annihilated their enemy, they have never been seen. Strange race! Our scientists say that in those last days they undoubtedly located the Gians and blasted them with a hatred born of centuries of oppression. And then, with their exploring parties underground finding food and water, they vanished with their weapon into the dark realms from which they had come. They wanted nothing of our world--feared us perhaps.