Lee awoke first. She remembered at once where she was, and sat up with
a sense of terror she had not experienced in the darkness of the night.
The fog was gone, the sun was well above the horizon. She and Cecil
were alone on a mountain peak so high above the world that the blue
depths of space seemed nigher than the planet below. The redwood forest
at the foot of the mountain looked like brush; on a glassy pond were
hundreds of toy boats; beyond was a toy city on toy hills. Far to the
South another solitary peak lifted itself into the heavens, dwarfing
the mountain ranges about it. Lee glanced to the left. Nothing there
but peak after peak bristling away into the north, black and rigid with
redwoods.
But it was not the stupendous isolation that terrified Lee. It was a
vague menace in the atmosphere about her, an accentuated stillness.
Over the scene was a grey web, so delicate, so transparent, that it
concealed nothing. Lee rubbed her eyes to make sure it was really
there. It might have been the malignant breath of the evil genius of
California. As she gazed, the mist slowly cohered. It became an almost
tangible veil through which San Francisco looked the phantom of a city
long since sunken to the bed of the Pacific. The sun glared through
it like the suspended crater of an angry volcano. The forests on the
mountain all at once seemed dead. The very air was petrified. The
silence was awful, appalling.
Lee caught Cecil by the shoulder and pulled him upright.
“Something terrible is going to happen,” she gasped. “Oh, I wish we
were home! I wish we were home.”
Cecil rubbed his eyes. He barely grasped the meaning of her words.
There was a dull muffled roar, which seemed to spring from the depths
of the planet, a terrible straining and rocking, and the very heart of
the mountain leaped under them.
Cecil saw Lee make a wild dart to the left. Then he was conscious of
nothing but a rapid descent amidst a hideous clatter of rock, and
the sensation that he was sliding from the surface of the earth into
space. Down he went, down, down, with the rumble below and the roar of
loosened earth and rock about him. Inside of him he fancied he could
hear the icicles of his blood rattle against each other. In his skull
was a horrible vacuum.
The slide stopped abruptly. Cecil looked dully about him, wondering
why the still trembling rocks had not ground him to pulp. He stumbled
to his feet mechanically, worked his way beyond the slide, then
climbed toward the cone from which he had been so abruptly evicted.
His knowledge of what he sought was very vague, a primal instinct.
Presently he saw Lee running toward him. Behind her was a man in the
rough garb of a mountaineer.
“It was an earthquake,” cried Lee, as she flung herself into Cecil’s
arms, “and he’s going to take us home.”