“They doubtless would have,” he said. “But access to the monsters’ realm is necessary. Centuries ago--how long ago no one now can say--a downward pressure of water menaced all this realm. Water from up above--from our Pacific doubtless--must have started breaking through. The rift was on the other side--that black sea of the monsters’ realm. This civilization is far older than ours, Jeff. I’m talking now of some remote past time when we might have been struggling in the Stone Age. Or before that. A rift came, and water menaced all this honeycombed region. The ancient people living here then must have been far advanced in science. And human life was very plentiful and held cheaply. “There is a system of dams and locks and watergates out there now, Jeff. I’ve never seen them, but I’ve heard them described. Like the dykes and canal gates, and dams of Holland, built gradually over centuries. It must have been a constant battle down here with the pressing water. They fought it. Out there now is a gigantic man-made barrier, with flood-gates, which if the pressure got too great, they could cautiously open to relieve it. Inconceivable to construct, but there it is. Like the pyramids, Jeff; patient toiling of millions of workers for generations. And they had science with them. The gates and wall must be hundreds of miles long, at the least. The gates are all controlled by one small mechanism--in a little fortress gate-house at this end of the dam. They are opened wide now--water is rushing through--” His voice rose. “The Middge can’t close them. The revolution isn’t ready, the weapons aren’t assembled. We have no weapons ready at all. Nobody is armed, or trained for fighting. A mob attack on the gate-house--she’d see it coming, and laugh at it.” “But Arturo, there in that other cavern, it must be two hundred miles beneath our Pacific.” He quieted. “I think so. There is some abyss in the ocean floor which we never have yet discovered. That is it, undoubtedly. And from it some gigantic, water-filled passage. That passage, leading downward, ending down here--” I tried to grasp the mathematics of it. But there was so little upon which to base a calculation. Water descending a passage, even hundreds of miles wide--passing down here through gates equally wide--it might take years to drain all our oceans. The gates were open full now. I recalled the newscasters of New York reporting the tides down a fathom in a day. Ten years, and there would still be water in the Nero Deep. I tried to estimate this abyss here across which we had flown. Fifty--a hundred like it might drain our Pacific. But this abyss was comparatively small; the realm of the monsters was far larger. Both of them, for the Pacific Ocean is not much over two miles in average depth, would drain it. And what other vast subterranean realms might be down here! Passages a thousand miles in length. Other caverns, under the Americas--under the Atlantic.