Argosy All-Story Weekly, August 9, 1924 — page 148: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

298 Fahn leaped to the projector; but Toroh had disappeared. ‘““ Hurry!” exclaimed the Scientist. He still would not let them question him. He was unlashing the projector; they helped him lower it to the ground. He leaped down after it, adjusting it, swinging it to bear down upon the lower peak. ‘‘We must hurry,” he repeated. He was back on the cabin platform. “ They will be out of the cavern, firing upon us.” The Noths down there were gazing up; others were now pouring out of the cav- ern entrance. Fahn’s projector was trained on the crater of the lower mountain. From this greater height its depths were visible. In the cabin of the plane the Scientist’s arms went around his daughters. ‘ Good- by, my girl—for a little time,”’ he whispered in their own tongue. They were frightened; suddenly Dee was crying. But he pushed them from him. He would attack the cavern; they must all stay in the plane—rise high—very high. Something in the man’s look—the com- mand in his voice—struck them all silent. They obeyed. He climbed down to the rock. The plane’s helicopters drew it swiftly into the air. The sun was above the eastern horizon; the sky seemed an inverted bowl of blood. Beneath the plane Fahn’s figure, standing beside his projector, showed clear cut against the black rock under him. At the base of the cavern-mountain Noths had appeared with apparatus. They were ad- justing it hurriedly. A blue-white flash from Fahn’s projector spat downward across the six hundred feet and into the crater mouth. Thunder rolled out. Another flash. Another—until they became almost continuous. Far down in the earth within the crater the slumbering forces there began to answer. A rumbling sounded—a low, ominous muttering, preg- nant with infinite power. Steam hissed ~ upward; a puff of smoke— The plane had been ascending rapidly; it was thousands of feet up now. Fahn’s thunderbolts persisted; and at last the angered fires of the earth were unleashed. The mountain seemed to split apart; the ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY, report was deafening; flaming gases, cin- ders and ashes were hurled upward and outward. The main force of the explosion was sidewise toward the city; but even so the plain barely avoided the torrent of molten rock and blazing gas that mounted from below. The city was engulfed in flame over which a heavy smoke hung like a pall. A tremendous lake of viscous liquid fire lay where the peaks and the cavern once had been. The earth was rumbling, shaking, splitting apart. The scene was vague—dull with a lurid red glare that struggled with the blackness of the smoke. A mement, and a rift appeared. The smoke seemed to part, roll aside. Through the rift the burning city showed for an mstant clear and distinct—the crowded city in which now no single human or beast could have remained alive. Still not content, the earth was heaving over the whole western end of the island. And from the sea a great tidal wave came rolling up over the sinking land—hissing, quenching the fires, obscuring everything in a cloud of steam. Like a mist the steam presently dissipated. The turgid waters lashed themselves into furious waves that gradually were stilled. It was daylight— sullen red day—with only the wreckage on the waters—charred fragments of bodies, thousands of them floating for miles around—mute evidence of what had gone before. CHAPTER XXX. THE RETURN. NCE again the plane hung like a shimmering ghost above the towering piles of steel and masonry—New York City at the peak of its civilization. To Azeela and Dee it had been a brief trip of awe and wonder—a trip northward through space and back through time. After the cataclysm, they had stayed but a week back in Anglese City. The entire western end of the island had sunk into the gulf, carrying Toroh and his Noths and the Arans and their king to destruction. GOMIIGIOO S (C@) nn