In London the great Thames was already flooding over its embankments into the great basin in which the city lay. The power-plants that lit the great city were failing one by one as the rising waters reached them, section after section snapping into sudden darkness, while away to the west the soaring red flames of a great fire east a quivering crimson glow across the doomed and drowning metropolis. Beneath that ghastly light, through the swift-running streets, the panic-driven mobs fought and splashed their way toward the nearest hills, toward the open country, toward safety. Crowded automobiles whirled through those streets in blind disregard of those whom they ran down. Ships all along the flooded harbor stood out to sea, preferring rather to face the great waves and mountainous tides than to be smashed helplessly against their moorings. Airplanes high above buzzed unceasingly through the night, to north and south and east, to wherever was higher ground. And in New York, too, the seas were lapping now against the great buildings that seemed to tower up in splendid disdain of the waters clawing at their bases. There, too, were flooded streets, and rushing, fear-mad mobs, and fierce men with burning eyes who bawled at street corners of the wrath of the Lord and of the returning deluge. Already immense crowds had collected on the heights of the island's northern part, and from there, and from the other heights westward, they watched with awe the sweeping seas that rolled and broke now across the squares and parks and avenues of the proudest city in the world. And by then, too, the populations of Boston, and Philadelphia, and San Francisco and Seattle were fleeing inland by every road, and of New Orleans there remained visible only the roofs of flooded buildings. Everywhere on earth, in those hours, men were turning away from the coasts, away from the vast, ravening seas that were hurling themselves over the land, and were pushing inland toward higher ground, toward the Alps and the Appalachians, toward the Pyrenees and the Andes, toward the Himalayas and the Rockies. And even as they fled, news was flashing along the last remaining lines of communication of great tidal waves that had wiped away life in the Hawaiian and Philippine Islands, of the waters of the China and Yellow Seas black with the bodies of drowned men, of the fear that had lit India red with the torch of terror, that had prostrated black and howling hordes along flooded African coasts, that had made of a hundred European cities infernos of roaring panic. For through all of earth's five continents, that night, the roads leading inland were the scene of the stampede of humanity.