“Certainly, there are many ways; perhaps the quickest and most effective to Earth-minds would be the sudden withdrawal from the atmosphere of, say, our world, our own Earth, of every trace of nitrogen. The air then being all oxygen, without any nitrogen to restrain it, would cause the whole world to catch fire; as the Bible says, ‘The elements shall melt with fervent heat; the earth also, and the works that are therein, shall be burned up’; everything would instantly catch fire; the water, seas, rocks, earth, and sky would become a molten mass of liquid fire—a fresh sun, full of the terrible energy of its own combustion; and in our blazing atmosphere and flaming clouds the people on other worlds would see exactly the same awful combustion as we are watching now. And our Earth, formed into a new sun, would probably still revolve round this sun, if his greater bulk and attraction had not then diminished, and would itself be the centre of a new system by reason of its energy attracting other planets, and causing them to form a new orbit round it. “Such an inevitable result would follow the simple withdrawal from Earth of such a deadly gas as nitrogen, which by a loving Creator has been made to temper its exactly opposite energising gas, oxygen, the addition of but one-fifth of which, as you know, is sufficient to turn the death-dealing four-fifths of nitrogen into our glorious, life-sustaining atmosphere, that is, of course, eliminating the small quantity of argon present (which is rather less than 1 per cent. of the atmosphere’s volume) and the carbon di-oxide and aqueous vapour. There is thus but a breath between life and an awful, agonising, though rapid, death.” Godfrey, deeply impressed, stood musing and looking out into the flaming sea around them, when just as he turned to Sorrel to ask a question, there was heard a report in the laboratory, and crash after crash followed in swift succession as something hard could be heard striking the metallic walls there, and then came the sound of shattering glass. CHAPTER XII THROUGH FIRE AND FLAME AND MYSTERY “I stand like one Has lost his way, and no man near him to inquire it of.” (+Sir Robert Howard.+)