But Stevens, too, had seen. Outlined dark against the growing white light beneath them he had glimpsed a dark, round object that was moving steadily and swiftly up toward them from beneath, that moved up with ever-increasing speed like the reversal of some object falling downward. Swiftly it came, and now he could see that it was a black metal globe perhaps a yard in diameter. He felt the submarine swerve sharply as Evans abruptly spun its wheel, glimpsed the uprushing globe grazing past its side, and then the thing had passed above them, and had struck full on the bottom of a submarine just above. There was a flash of intense purple light, flaring out through the waters in blinding intensity, and then the submarine rocked and spun like a leaf in a gale, while the great flash and the craft above which it had enveloped vanished together. "Bombs!" shouted Clinton. "Bombs of some kind that they release from beneath, to rise and strike us--and look, more----" Even as he spoke there was rushing up toward them from beneath an immense mass of the round black globes, seeming in that moment to fill the waters about them. Stevens remembered the next few moments only as a timeless period of flashing action. He felt the submarine dive steeply downward under the hand of its commander, saw through the glass scores of the deadly globes flashing up past them, and then the submarine again was rocked by titanic convulsions of the waters about it as craft after craft of the fleet above them vanished in blinding flashes of the purple light. In those few minutes, he knew, scores of the submarines that followed them had fallen victim to the deadly spheres. But now the great fleet, diving sharply amid that deadly uprush of globes, was within a few thousand feet of the sea's floor, was slanting down through the white radiance toward the city below, which Stevens saw for the first time. A moment, as the fleet seemed to pause above the city, he saw it all plain--the multitudes of ranked great globular structures, stretching away as far as the eye could see, the dark, slug-like beings that hastened through their streets and squares, the vast pit at the city's center from which arose the mighty, half-glimpsed current of waters, and the towering spire near that pit's edge, the tiny bulbular room at its top a point of green radiance, around which were grouped scores of the vast, thousand-foot striding-machines. Then that one moment of pause was over and the whole great fleet was swooping down upon the city below, releasing a shower of great torpedoes and bombs as it did so.