The whole scene was painted dimly green with a diffused effulgence of light. We stared, all of us for a moment unbreathing. Mysterious, awesome, uncanny! A crest to the left with a dangling forest of marine vegetation, gently swaying. Occasional dark blobs of prowling marine life. All dark and dimly turgid. A scene with a quality almost infernal. I could not grasp much of it at first. But it grew upon me--I think we may have been there an hour, staring. It grew upon me, like formless shadows slowly taking form in a pregnant darkness. The green light suffused everything. But down in the caldron it was concentrated into many small points. Moving dots; blobs of light--and near the center a large luminous area which presently seemed almost bright. Moving dots of light. Things moving, carrying with them the lights. Things that presently seemed cubes and oblongs of metal. I fancied they may have been, some of them, a hundred or two hundred feet in length; moving metal containers. With human occupants? My reason told me so. They showed no details, only as distant blobs. But my fancy supplied details; I could imagine them being dragged very slowly up the slope toward Maui with giant chains. Or perhaps they went as our old-fashioned tractors used to move, with caterpillar tread. One moved, and stopped; and I did not see it move again. Then another; another--a little distance gained for each. And the movement was always upward, toward Maui’s green mountaintop--toward that bright ethereal other world of land and sky! It grew upon me, this scene so darkly, silently infernal. The slow patience of it! But there was other, swifter movement. Smaller, individual, metallic vehicles moved more swiftly about as though commanding. Some darted like tiny sub-sea vessels, carrying lights. Others moved on the bottom. There were unlighted shapes that seemed not much larger than a human figure, moving among the rocks on the caldron floor. The broad, circular, nearly-bright area seemed to have a great transparent dome over it, like an amphitheater suffused with illumination. I think the water was excluded from under it. The encampment of this attacking army! It was distant from us, with image tiny to our sight. Human figures in there, moving about. Tiny dots of green light strung above them. Shapes of things that might have been houses; tiers of them, terraced like sections of a pyramid. An encampment, crowded with apparatus perhaps. I even fancied I could see some of it, which the figures were assembling. Dr. Plantet was fumbling with our telescope. He turned on its tiny penetrating ray of light, but Arturo leaped at him. “Don’t, father!” I reached and snapped off the light. But it had betrayed us. We did not know it then; for another interval we gazed down from this height where it seemed that in darkness the Dolphin lay secure on the crest of the gully-mouth.