"Sweep them! Sweep them!" cried Colonel Smith, as he brought his
disintegrator to bear. Mr. Phillips and I instantly followed his example,
and thus we swept the Martians into eternity, while Mr. Edison coolly
continued his manipulations of the wheel.
The effect of what he was doing became apparent in less than half a
minute. A shiver ran through the mass of machinery and shook the entire
building.
"Look! look!" cried Sidney Phillips, who had stepped a little apart from
the others.
The Grand Canal.
We all ran to his side and found ourselves in front of a great window
which opened through the side of the engine, giving a view of what lay
in front of it. There, gleaming in the electric lights, we saw the
Syrtis Major, its waters washing high against the walls of the vast
power house. Running directly out from the shore, there was an immense
metallic gate at least 400 yards in length and rising 300 feet above
the present level of the water.
This great gate was slowly swinging upon an invisible hinge in such a
manner that in a few minutes it would evidently stand across the current
of the Syrtis Major at right angles.
Beyond was a second gate, which was moving in the same manner. Further
on was a third gate, and then another, and another, as far as the eye
could reach, evidently extending in an unbroken series completely across
the great strait.
As the gates, with accelerated motion when the current caught them,
clanged together, we beheld a spectacle that almost stopped the beating
of our hearts.
A Great Rush of Waters.
The great Syrtis seemed to gather itself for a moment, and then it leaped
upon the obstruction and hurled its waters into one vast foaming geyser
that seemed to shoot a thousand feet skyward.
But the metal gates withstood the shock, though buried from our sight
in the seething white mass, and the baffled waters instantly swirled
round in ten thousand gigantic eddies, rising to the level of our window
and beginning to inundate the power house before we fairly comprehended
our peril.
"We have done the work," said Mr. Edison, smiling grimly. "Now we had
better get out of this before the flood bursts upon us."
The warning came none too soon. It was necessary to act upon it at once
if we would save our lives. Even before we could reach the entrance to
the long passage through which we had come into the great engine room, the
water had risen half way to our knees. Colonel Smith, catching Aina under
his arm, led the way. The roar of the maddened torrent behind deafened us.
As we ran through the passage, the water followed us, with a wicked
swishing sound, and within five seconds it was above our knees; in ten
seconds up to our waists.
The great danger now was that we should be swept from our feet, and once
down in that torrent there would have been little chance of our ever
getting our heads above its level. Supporting ourselves as best we could
with the aid of the walls, we partly ran, and were partly swept along,
until, when we reached the outer end of the passage and emerged into
the open air, the flood was swirling about our shoulders.
Escaping the Water.
Here there was an opportunity to clutch some of the ornamental work
surrounding the doorway, and thus we managed to stay our mad progress,
and gradually to work out of the current until we found that the water,
having now an abundance of room to spread, had fallen again as low as
our knees.
But suddenly we heard the thunder of the banks tumbling behind us, and
to the right and left, and the savage growl of the released water as it
sprang through the breaches.
To my dying day, I think, I shall not forget the sight of a great fluid
column that burst through the dyke at the edge of the grove of trees, and,
by the tremendous impetus of its rush, seemed turned into a solid thing.
Like an enormous ram, it plowed the soil to a depth of twenty feet,
uprooting acres of the immense trees like stubble turned over by the
plowshare.
The uproar was so awful that for an instant the coolest of us lost our
self-control. Yet we knew that we had not the fraction of a second to
waste. The breaking of the banks had caused the water again rapidly to
rise about us. In a little while it was once more as high as our waists.
In the excitement and confusion, deafened by the noise and blinded by
the flying foam, we were in danger of becoming separated in the flood. We
no longer knew certainly in what direction was the tree by whose aid we
had ascended from the electrical ship. We pushed first one way and then
another, staggering through the rushing waters in search of it. Finally
we succeeded in locating it, and with all our strength hurried toward it.
Then there came a noise as if the globe of Mars had been split asunder,
and another great head of water hurled itself down upon the soil before
us, and, without taking time to spread, bored a vast cavity in the ground,
and scooped out the whole of the grove before our eyes as easily as a
gardener lifts a sod with his spade.
Are We, Too, Destroyed?
Our last hope was gone. For a moment the level of the water around us
sank again, as it poured into the immense excavation where the grove had
stood, but in an instant it was reinforced from all sides and began once
more rapidly to rise.
We gave ourselves up for lost, and, indeed, there did not seem any
possible hope of salvation.
Even in the extremity I saw Colonel Smith lifting the form of Aina, who
had fainted, above the surface of the surging water, while Sidney Phillips
stood by his side and aided him in supporting the unconscious girl.
"We stayed a little too long," was the only sound I heard from Mr. Edison.
The huge bulk of the power house partially protected us against the force
of the current, and the water spun around us in great eddies. These swept
us this way and that, but yet we managed to cling together, determined
not to be separated in death if we could avoid it.
Suddenly a cry rang out directly above our heads:
"Jump for your lives, and be quick!"
At the same instant the ends of several ropes splashed into the water.
We glanced upward, and there, within three or four yards of our heads,
hung the electrical ship, which we had left moored at the top of the tree.
Tom, the expert electrician from Mr. Edison's shop, who had remained in
charge of the ship, had never once dreamed of such a thing as deserting
us. The moment he saw the water bursting over the dam, and evidently
flooding the building which we had entered, he cast off his moorings,
as we subsequently learned, and hovered over the entrance to the power
house, getting as low down as possible and keeping a sharp watch for us.
But most of the electric lights in the vicinity had been carried down by
the first rush of water, and in the darkness he did not see us when we
emerged from the entrance. It was only after the sweeping away of the
grove of trees had allowed a flood of light to stream upon the scene
from a cluster of electric lamps on a distant portion of the bank on
the Syrtis that had not yet given way that he caught sight of us.
Mars Is Ruined!
Immediately he began to shout to attract our attention, but in the awful
uproar we could not hear him. Getting together all the ropes that he
could lay his hands on, he steered the ship to a point directly over us,
and then dropped down within a few yards of the boiling flood.
Now as he hung over our heads, and saw the water up to our very necks
and still swiftly rising, he shouted again:
"Catch hold, for God's sake!"
The three men who were with him in the ship seconded his cries.
But by the time we had fairly grasped the ropes, so rapidly was the flood
rising, we were already afloat. With the assistance of Tom and his men we
were rapidly drawn up, and immediately Tom reversed the electric polarity,
and the ship began to rise.
At that same instant, with a crash that shivered the air, the immense
metallic power house gave way and was swept tumbling, like a hill torn
loose from its base, over the very spot where a moment before we had
stood. One second's hesitation on the part of Tom, and the electrical
ship would have been battered into a shapeless wad of metal by the
careening mass.
The Deluge On Mars.
How the Martians Met Their Doom Through Aina's Plans.
When we had attained a considerable height, so that we could see to a
great distance on either side, the spectacle became even more fearful
than it was when we were close to the surface.
On all sides banks and dykes were going down; trees were being uprooted;
buildings were tumbling, and the ocean was achieving that victory over
the land which had long been its due, but which the ingenuity of the
inhabitants of Mars had postponed for ages.
Far away we could see the front of the advancing wave crested with foam
that sparkled in the electric lights, and as it swept on it changed the
entire aspect of the planet--in front of it all life, behind it all death.
Eastward our view extended across the Syrtis Major toward the land of
Libya and the region of Isidis. On that side also the dykes were giving
way under the tremendous pressure, and the floods were rushing toward
the sunrise, which had just begun to streak the eastern sky.
The continents that were being overwhelmed on the western side of the
Syrtis were Meroe, Aeria, Arabia, Edom and Eden.
The water beneath us continually deepened. The current from the melting
snows around the southern pole was at its strongest, and one could
hardly have believed that any obstruction put in its path would have
been able to arrest it and turn it into these two all-swallowing deluges,
sweeping east and west. But, as we now perceived, the level of the land
over a large part of its surface was hundreds of feet below the ocean,
so that the latter, when once the barriers were broken, rushed into
depressions that yawned to receive it.
Waiting for the Flood.
The point where we had dealt our blow was far removed from the great
capital of Mars, around the Lake of the Sun, and we knew that we should
have to wait for the floods to reach that point before the desired effect
could be produced. By the nearest way, the water had at least 5,000
miles to travel. We estimated that its speed where we hung above it was
as much as a hundred miles an hour. Even if that speed were maintained,
more than two days and nights would be required for the floods to reach
the Lake of the Sun.
But as the water rushed on it would break the banks of all the canals
intersecting the country, and these, being also elevated above the
surface, would add the impetus of their escaping waters to hasten the
advance of the flood. We calculated, therefore, that about two days
would suffice to place the planet at our mercy.
Half way from the Syrtis Major to the Lake of the Sun another great
connecting link between the Southern and Northern ocean basins, called
on our maps of Mars the Indus, existed, and through this channel we
knew that another great current must be setting from the south toward
the north. The flood that we had started would reach and break the banks
of the Indus within one day.
Flooding Hundreds of Canals.
The flood travelling in the other direction, towards the east, would
have considerably further to go before reaching the neighborhood of
the Lake of the Sun. It, too, would involve hundreds of great canals
as it advanced and would come plunging upon the Lake of the Sun and its
surrounding forts and cities, probably about half a day later than the
arrival of the deluge that travelled towards the west.
Now that we had let the awful destroyer loose we almost shrank from the
thought of the consequences which we had produced. How many millions
would perish as the result of our deed we could not even guess. Many
of the victims, so far as we knew, might be entirely innocent of enmity
toward us, or of the evil which had been done to our native planet. But
this was a case in which the good--if they existed--must suffer with
the bad on account of the wicked deeds of the latter.
I have already remarked that the continents of Mars were higher on their
northern and southern borders where they faced the great oceans. These
natural barriers bore to the main mass of the land somewhat the relation
of the edge of a shallow dish to its bottom. Their rise on the land
side was too gradual to give them the appearance of hills, but on the
side toward the sea they broke down in steep banks and cliffs several
hundred feet in height. We guessed that it would be in the direction
of these elevations that the inhabitants would flee, and those who had
timely warning might thus be able to escape in case the flood did not--as
it seemed possible it might in its first mad rush--overtop the highest
elevations on Mars.
A Dreadful Scene.
As day broke and the sun slowly rose upon the dreadful scene beneath
us, we began to catch sight of some of the fleeing inhabitants. We
had shifted the position of the fleet toward the south, and were now
suspended above the southeastern corner of Aeria. Here a high bank of
reddish rock confronted the sea, whose waters ran lashing and roaring
along the bluffs to supply the rapid draught produced by the emptying
of the Syrtis Major. Along the shore there was a narrow line of land,
hundreds of miles in length, but less than a quarter of a mile broad,
which still rose slightly above the surface of the water, and this land
of refuge was absolutely packed with the monstrous inhabitants of the
planet who had fled hither on the first warning that the water was coming.
In some places it was so crowded that the later comers could not find
standing ground on dry land, but were continually slipping back and
falling into the water. It was an awful sight to look at them. It
reminded me of pictures that I had seen of the deluge in the days of
Noah, when the waters had risen to the mountain tops, and men, women
and children were fighting for a foothold upon the last dry spots that
the earth contained.
We were all moved by a desire to help our enemies, for we were overwhelmed
with feelings of pity and remorse, but to aid them was now utterly
beyond our power. The mighty floods were out, and the end was in the
hands of God.
Fortunately, we had little time for these thoughts, because no sooner
had the day begun to dawn around us than the airships of the Martians
appeared. Evidently the people in them were dazed by the disaster and
uncertain what to do. It is doubtful whether at first they comprehended
the fact that we were the agents who had produced the cataclysm.
The Flocking of the Airships.
But as the morning advanced the airships came flocking in greater and
greater numbers from every direction, many swooping down close to the
flood in order to rescue those who were drowning. Hundreds gathered along
the slip of land which was crowded as I have described, with refugees,
while other hundreds rapidly assembled about us, evidently preparing
for an attack.
We had learned in our previous contests with the airships of the Martians
that our electrical ships had a great advantage over them, not merely in
rapidity and facility of movement, but in the fact that our disintegrators
could sweep in every direction, while it was only with much difficulty
that the Martian airships could discharge their electrical strokes at
an enemy poised directly above their heads.
Accordingly, orders were instantly flashed to all the squadron to rise
vertically to an elevation so great that the rarity of the atmosphere
would prevent the airships from attaining the same level.
Outwitting the Enemy.
This manoeuvre was executed so quickly that the Martians were unable
to deal us a blow before we were poised above them in such a position
that they could not easily reach us. Still they did not mean to give up
the conflict.
Presently we saw one of the largest of their ships manoeuvring in a very
peculiar manner, the purpose of which we did not at first comprehend. Its
forward portion commenced slowly to rise, until it pointed upward like
the nose of a fish approaching the surface of the water. The moment it
was in this position, an electrical bolt was darted from its prow, and
one of our ships received a shock which, although it did not prove fatal
to the vessel itself, killed two or three men aboard it, disarranged
its apparatus, and rendered it for the time being useless.
"Ah, that's their trick, is it?" said Mr. Edison. "We must look out for
that. Whenever you see one of the airships beginning to stick its nose
up after that fashion blaze away at it."
An order to this effect was transmitted throughout the squadron. At the
same time several of the most powerful disintegrators were directed upon
the ship which had executed the stratagem and, reduced to a wreck, it
dropped, whirling like a broken kite until it fell into the flood beneath.
A Thousand Martian Ships.
Still the Martians' ships came flocking in ever greater numbers from all
directions. They made desperate attempts to attain the level at which we
hung above them. This was impossible, but many, getting an impetus by a
swift run in the denser portion of the atmosphere beneath, succeeded in
rising so high that they could discharge their electric artillery with
considerable effect. Others, with more or less success, repeated the
manoeuvre of the ship which had first attacked us, and thus the battle
became gradually more general and more fierce, until, in the course of an
hour or two, our squadron found itself engaged with probably a thousand
airships, which blazed with incessant lightning strokes, and were able,
all too frequently, to do us serious damage.
But on our part the battle was waged with a cool determination and a
consciousness of insuperable advantage which boded ill for the enemy. Only
three or four of our sixty electrical ships were seriously damaged,
while the work of the disintegrators upon the crowded fleet that floated
beneath us was terrible to look upon.
They Battle on in Earnest.
Our strokes fell thick and fast on all sides. It was like firing into
a flock of birds that could not get away. Notwithstanding all their
efforts they were practically at our mercy. Shattered into unrecognizable
fragments, hundreds of the airships continually dropped from their great
height to be swallowed up in the boiling waters.
Yet they were game to the last. They made every effort to get at us, and
in their frenzy they seemed to discharge their bolts without much regard
to whether friends or foes were injured. Our eyes were nearly blinded
by the ceaseless glare beneath us, and the uproar was indescribable.
At length, after this fearful contest had lasted for at least three
hours, it became evident that the strength of the enemy was rapidly
weakening. Nearly the whole of their immense fleet of airships had been
destroyed, or so far damaged that they were barely able to float. Just
so long, however, as they showed signs of resistance we continued to
pour our merciless fire upon them, and the signal to cease was not given
until the airships which had escaped serious damage began to flee in
every direction.
Victory Is Ours!
"Thank God, the thing is over," said Mr. Edison. "We have got the victory
at last, but how we shall make use of it is something that at present
I do not see."
"But will they not renew the attack," asked someone.
"I do not think they can," was the reply. "We have destroyed the very
flower of their fleet."
"And better than that," said Colonel Smith, "we have destroyed their elan;
we have made them afraid. Their discipline is gone."
But this was only the beginning of our victory. The floods below were
achieving a still greater triumph, and now that we had conquered the
airships we dropped within a few hundred feet of the surface of the water
and then turned our faces westward in order to follow the advance of the
deluge and see whether, as we had hoped, it would overwhelm our enemies
in the very centre of their power.
The Flood Advances.
In a little while we had overtaken the front wave, which was still
devouring everything. We saw it bursting the banks of the canals, sweeping
away forests of gigantic trees, and swallowing cities and villages,
leaving nothing but a broad expanse of swirling and eddying waters,
which, in consequence of the prevailing red hue of the vegetation and
the soil, looked, as shuddering we gazed down upon it, like an ocean
of blood flecked with foam and steaming with the escaping life of the
planet from whose veins it gushed.
As we skirted the southern borders of the continent the same
dreadful scenes which we had beheld on the coast of Aeria presented
themselves. Crowds of refugees thronged the high border of the land
and struggled with one another for a foothold against the continually
rising flood.
Watching the Destruction.
We saw, too, flitting in every direction, but rapidly fleeing before our
approach, many airships, evidently crowded with Martians, but not armed
either for offence or defence. These, of course, we did not disturb, for
merciless as our proceedings seemed even to ourselves, we had no intention
of making war upon the innocent, or upon those who had no means to resist.
What we had done it had seemed to us necessary to do, but henceforth we
were resolved to take no more lives if it could be avoided.
Thus, during the remainder of that day, all of the following night and
all of the next day, we continued upon the heels of the advancing flood.