He spoke with a rising vehemence. “Our world will have to defend itself, father! You were right in your fears! The main attacks may not come until after the ocean beds are dry. It will be a land-fight then--in these new strange lands that we have never seen! Or there may be an attack very shortly. The Gians, an army of them, are coming up. Moving up an equipment of weapons. It may be merely an experiment preparatory to the main warfare. Nereid has heard it may be; I certainly hope so.” He paused, then suddenly added: “They are moving upon the Hawaiian group, not far from here--down near Maui. We’re going to show you!” * * * * * The Hawaiian group of mountain-tops were built long ages ago along a crack on the ocean floor by a string of volcanos; some are peaks, seven miles straight up from the surrounding depths. An island-bearing rise some seventeen hundred miles long, quite narrow, extends from Hawaii in the southeast, to Ocean Island at the northwest tip. We circled Ocean Island, and running a hundred miles from the crest, near the bottom of the slope, we followed it southeast. Past the peak of Midway; past Gambia Shoal; Pearl and Hermes Reef; Lisiansky; Brooks and Bird; and came at last near Kauai. We ran often near the surface, but sometimes deep. Everywhere, we saw the same sharp upward rise to this hog-back, razor ridge. A jagged, tumbled sub-marine region. Here, in some remote geological era of the past, nature had obviously been convulsed. Domes and peaks and crags; steep, sharp ridges; caldrons like black pits; tumbled, broken land, submerged now, but lying like some wild, naked mountain fastness. There were slopes of truly precipitous character; cliffs, eroded with great side holes; black ravines and gullies; bowlders of giant size, pitted and scarred, strewn where some volcano had flung them. A wild, naked region; rising in great serrated tiers from the ocean floor up this hundred-mile slope to the island peaks at its summit. We came to the surface off the island of Kauai. More than a hundred feet of naked slope, had been exposed by the fallen ocean. But the green island stood serene up there on its peak. The comparatively shallow two-thousand-fathom depth extended out here in a great circular plateau to the north. Our charts showed it almost level for several hundred miles. We dived and followed over its shoreward, necklike width, and came again into deeper water.