"They finally, after long discussion, adopted a stupendous plan, which was none other than to produce artificially such vast quantities of water as would replenish the dwindled seas, would cover all earth miles deep with them and give all earth as the slug-people's domain. They knew, in their science, how to form atoms of any element out of the primal ether itself by raising it to the desired frequency of vibration. Just as they had produced light from the ether they could produce matter, which is but a vibration of the universal ether. Suppose, then, that they set up vast generators to form immense quantities of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and suppose those tremendous quantities of hydrogen and oxygen were mixed together, with a small proportion of certain chemicals added. The result would be that from the generators immense quantities of sea water would be shot forth to add to the sea's bulk, to cause it to rise until it covered the highest peaks. They needed only to make generators of sufficient size and number, and at this they set to work. "They set to work, and for the sake of convenience they built their vast generators under their own cities, which were located in all the great deeps of the sea over earth, in the Atlantic and Pacific and Indian oceans, vast cities with countless hordes of the slug-creatures. Under each of their cities lay one of the titanic generators, with a vast pit-opening at the city's center for the waters that would be formed to issue forth from beneath. It was a work of centuries, of ages, this building of the great generators, one beside which the building of the pyramids was but the task of an hour. Man rose to power on earth above them, never suspecting their presence, even, and still in the depths the slug-creatures worked on at their great task, that was to give them all the world.