THE LAST DAY OF NEW YORK
While Cosmo Versál was calculating, from the measured rise of the water,
the rate of condensation of the nebula, and finding that it added
twenty-nine trillion two hundred and ninety billion tons to the weight
of the earth every minute--a computation that seemed to give him great
mental satisfaction--the metropolis of the world, whose nucleus was the
island of Manhattan, and every other town and city on the globe that
lay near the ordinary level of the sea, was swiftly sinking beneath the
swelling flood.
Everywhere, over all the broad surface of the planet, a wail of despair
arose from the perishing millions, beaten down by the water that poured
from the unpitying sky. Even on the highlands the situation was little
better than in the valleys. The hills seemed to have been turned into the
crests of cataracts from which torrents of water rushed down on all sides,
stripping the soil from the rocks, and sending the stones and bowlders
roaring and leaping into the lowlands and the gorges. Farmhouses, barns,
villas, trees, animals, human beings--all were swept away together.
Only on broad elevated plateaus, where higher points rose above the general
level, were a few of the inhabitants able to find a kind of refuge. By
seeking these high places, and sheltering themselves as best they could
among immovable rocks, they succeeded, at least, in delaying their fate.
Notwithstanding the fact that the atmosphere was filled with falling water,
they could yet breathe, if they kept the rain from striking directly in
their faces. It was owing to this circumstance, and to some extraordinary
occurrences which we shall have to relate, that the fate of the human race
was not precisely that which Cosmo Versál had predicted.
We quitted the scene in New York when the shadow of night had just fallen,
and turned the gloom of the watery atmosphere into impenetrable darkness.
The events of that dreadful night we shall not attempt to depict. When the
hours of daylight returned, and the sun should have brightened over the
doomed city, only a faint, phosphorescent luminosity filled the sky. It
was just sufficient to render objects dimly visible. If the enclosing
nebula had remained in a cloud-like state it would have cut off all light,
but having condensed into raindrops, which streamed down in parallel lines,
except when sudden blasts of wind swept them into a confused mass, the
sunlight was able to penetrate through the interstices, aided by the
transparency of the water, and so a slight but variable illumination was
produced.
In this unearthly light many tall structures of the metropolis, which had
as yet escaped the effects of undermining by the rushing torrents in the
streets, towered dimly toward the sky, shedding streams of water from every
cornice. Most of the buildings of only six or eight stories had already
been submerged, with the exception of those that stood on the high grounds
in the upper part of the island, and about Spuyten Duyvil.
In the towers and upper stories of the lofty buildings still standing in
the heart of the city, crowds of unfortunates assembled, gazing with
horror at the spectacles around them, and wringing their hands in helpless
despair. When the light brightened they could see below them the angry
water, creeping every instant closer to their places of refuge, beaten
into foam by the terrible downpour, and sometimes, moved by a mysterious
impulse, rising in sweeping waves which threatened to carry everything
before them.
Every few minutes one of the great structures would sway, crack, crumble,
and go down into the seething flood, the cries of the lost souls being
swallowed up in the thunder of the fall. And when this occurred within
sight of neighboring towers yet intact, men and women could be seen, some
with children in their arms, madly throwing themselves from windows and
ledges, seeking quick death now that hope was no more!
Strange and terrible scenes were enacted in the neighborhood of what had
been the water-fronts. Most of the vessels moored there had been virtually
wrecked by the earlier invasion of the sea. Some had been driven upon the
shore, others had careened and been swamped at their wharves. But a few had
succeeded in cutting loose in time to get fairly afloat. Some tried to go
out to sea, but were wrecked by running against obstacles, or by being
swept over the Jersey flats. Some met their end by crashing into the
submerged pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Others steered up the course
of the Hudson River, but that had become a narrow sea, filled with floating
and tossing debris of every sort, and all landmarks being invisible, the
luckless navigators lost their way, and perished, either through collisions
with other vessels, or by driving upon a rocky shore.
The fate of the gigantic building containing the offices of the municipal
government, which stood near the ancient City Hall, and which had been the
culminating achievement of the famous epoch of "sky-scrapers," was a thing
so singular, and at the same time dramatic, that in a narrative dealing
with less extraordinary events than we are obliged to record it would
appear altogether incredible.
With its twoscore lofty stories, and its massive base, this wonderful
structure rose above the lower quarter of the city, and dominated it, like
a veritable Tower of Babel, made to defy the flood. Many thousands of
people evidently regarded it in that very light, and they had fled from all
quarters, as soon as the great downpour began, to find refuge within its
mountainous flanks. There were men--clerks, merchants, brokers from the
downtown offices--and women and children from neighboring tenements.
By good chance, but a few weeks before, this building had been fitted with
a newly invented system of lighting, by which each story was supplied with
electricity from a small dynamo of its own, and so it happened that now the
lamps within were all aglow, lightening the people's hearts a little with
their cheering radiance.
Up and up they climbed, the water ever following at their heels, from floor
to floor, until ten of the great stages were submerged. But there were more
than twice as many stages yet above, and they counted them with unexpiring
hope, telling one another, with the assurance of desperation, that long
before the flood could attain so stupendous an altitude the rain would
surely cease, and the danger, as far as they were concerned, would pass
away.
"See! See!" cries one. "It is stopping! It is coming no higher! I've been
watching that step, and the water has stopped! It hasn't risen for ten
minutes!"
"Hurrah! Hurrah!" yells the crowd behind and above. And the glad cry is
taken up and reverberated from story to story until it bursts wildly out
into the rain-choked air at the very summit.
"Hurrah! Hurrah! We are saved! The flood has stopped!"
Men madly embrace each other. Women burst into tears and hug their children
to their breasts, filled with a joy and thankfulness that can find no
expression in words.
"You are wrong," says another man, crouching beside him who first spoke.
"It has not stopped--it is still rising."
"_What_! I tell you it _has_ stopped," snaps the other. "Look at that step!
It stopped right below it."
"_You've been watching the wrong step_. It's rising!"
"You fool! Shut your mouth! I say it has _stopped_."
"No, it has not."
"It has! It has!"
"Look at _that_ step, then! See the water just now coming over it."
The obstinate optimist stares a moment, turns pale, and then, with an oath,
strikes his more clear-headed neighbor in the face! And the excited crowd
behind, with the blind instinctive feeling that, somehow, he has robbed
them of the hope which was but now as the breath of life to them, strike
him and curse him, too.
But he had seen only too clearly.
With the steady march of fate--two inches a minute, as Cosmo Versál had
accurately measured it--the water still advances and climbs upward.
In a little while they were driven to another story, and then to another.
But hope would not down. They could not believe that the glad news, which
had so recently filled them with joy, was altogether false. The water
_must_ have stopped rising _once_; it had been _seen_. Then, it would
surely stop _again_, stop to rise no more.
Poor deluded creatures! With the love of life so strong within them, they
could not picture, in their affrighted minds, the terrible consummation to
which they were being slowly driven, when, jammed into the narrow chambers
at the very top of the mighty structure, their remorseless enemy would
seize them at last.
But they were nearer the end than they could have imagined even if they had
accepted and coolly reasoned upon the facts that were so plain before them.
And, after all, it was not to come upon them only after they had fought
their way to the highest loft and into the last corner.
A link of this strange chain of fatal events now carries us to the spot
where the United States Navy Yard in Brooklyn once existed. That place was
sunk deep beneath the waters. All of the cruisers, battleships, and other
vessels that had been at anchor or at moorings there had gone under. One
only, the boast of the American navy, the unconquerable _Uncle Sam_, which,
in the last great war that the world had known, had borne the starry flag
to victories whose names broke men's voices and filled their eyes with
tears of pride, had escaped, through the incomparable seamanship of Captain
Robert Decatur, who had been her commander for thirty years.
But though the _Uncle Sam_ managed to float upon the rising flood, she
was unable to get away because of the obstructions lodged about the great
bridges that spanned the East River. A curious eddy that the raging
currents formed over what was once the widest part of that stream kept
her revolving round and round, never departing far in any direction,
and, with majestic strength, riding down or brushing aside the floating
timbers, wooden houses, and other wreckage that pounded furiously against
her mighty steel sides.
Just at the time when the waters had mounted to the eighteenth story of the
beleaguered Municipal Building, a sudden change occurred in these currents.
They swept westward with resistless force, and the _Uncle Sam_ was
carried directly over the drowned city. First she encountered the cables of
the Manhattan Bridge, striking them near the western tower, and, swinging
round, wrenched the tower itself from its foundations and hurled it beneath
the waters.
Then she rushed on, riding with the turbid flood high above the buried
roofs, finding no other obstruction in her way until she approached the
Municipal Building, which was stoutly resisting the push of the waves.
[Illustration: "THE GREAT BATTLESHIP... CRASHED, PROW ON, INTO THE
STEEL-RIBBED WALLS"]
Those who were near the windows and on the balconies, on the eastern side
of the building, saw the great battleship coming out of the gray gloom
like some diluvian monster, and before they could comprehend what it was,
it crashed, prow on, into the steel-ribbed walls, driving them in as if
they had been the armored sides of an enemy.
So tremendous was the momentum of the striking mass that the huge vessel
passed, like a projectile, through walls and floors and partitions. But as
she emerged in the central court the whole vast structure came thundering
down upon her, and ship and building together sank beneath the boiling
waves.
But out of the awful tangle of steel girders, that whipped the air and the
water as if some terrible spidery life yet clung to them, by one of those
miracles of chance which defy all the laws of probability and reason, a
small boat of levium, that had belonged to the _Uncle Sam_, was cast forth,
and floated away, half submerged but unsinkable; and clinging to its
thwarts, struggling for breath, insane with terror, were two men, the sole
survivors of all those thousands.
One of them was a seaman who had taken refuge, with a crowd of comrades,
in the boat before the battleship rushed down upon the building. All of
his comrades had been hurled out and lost when the blow came, while his
present companion was swept in and lodged against the thwarts. And so
those two waifs drove off in the raging waves. Both of them were bleeding
from many wounds, but they had no fatal hurts.
The boat, though filled with water, was so light that it could not sink.
Moreover, it was ballasted, and amid all its wild gyrations it kept right
side up. Even the ceaseless downpour from the sky could not drive it
beneath the waves.
After a while the currents that had been setting westward changed their
direction, and the boat was driven toward the north. It swept on past
toppling skyscrapers until it was over the place where Madison Square once
spread its lawns, looked down upon by gigantic structures, most of which
had now either crumbled and disappeared or were swaying to their fall. Here
there was an eddy, and the boat turned round and round amid floating debris
until two other draggled creatures, who had been clinging to floating
objects, succeeded by desperate efforts in pulling themselves into it.
Others tried but failed, and no one lent a helping hand. Those who were
already in the boat neither opposed nor aided the efforts of those who
battled to enter it. No words were heard in the fearful uproar--only
inarticulate cries.
Suddenly the current changed again, and the boat, with its dazed occupants,
was hurried off in the direction of the Hudson. Night was now beginning
once more to drop an obscuring curtain over the scene, and under that
curtain the last throes of drowning New York were hidden. When the sun
again faintly illuminated the western hemisphere the whole Atlantic
seaboard was buried under the sea.
As the water rose higher, Cosmo Versál's Ark at last left its cradle, and
cumbrously floated off, moving first eastward, then turning in the
direction of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Cosmo had his engines in operation,
but their full power was not developed as soon as he had expected, and
the great vessel drifted at the will of the currents and the wind, the
latter coming now from one side and now from another, rising at times to
hurricane strength and then dying away until only a spanking breeze swept
the ever-falling rain into swishing sheets. Occasionally the wind failed
entirely, and for many minutes at a time the water fell in vertical
streams.
At length the motive power of the Ark was developed, and it began to obey
its helm. From the shelter of a "captain's bridge," constructed at the
forward end of the huge levium dome that covered the vessel, Cosmo Versál,
with Captain Arms, a liberally bewhiskered, veteran navigator in whose
skill he confided, peered over the interminable waste of waters. There was
nothing in sight except floating objects that had welled up from the
drowned city and the surrounding villages. Here and there the body of an
animal or a human being was seen in the tossing waves, and Cosmo Versál
sadly shook his head as he pointed them out, but the stout mariner at his
side chewed his tobacco, and paid attention only to his duties, shouting
orders from time to time through a speaking-tube, or touching an electric
button.
Cosmo Versál brought a rain-gage and again and again allowed it to fill
itself. The story was always the same--two inches per minute, ten feet per
hour, the water mounted.
The nebula had settled down to regular work, and, if Cosmo's calculations
were sound, there would be no intermission for four months.
After the power of the propellers had been developed the Ark was steered
southeastward. Its progress was very slow. In the course of eight hours
it had not gone more than fifty miles. The night came on, and the speed
was reduced until there was only sufficient way to insure the command of
the vessel's movements. Powerful searchlights were employed as long as
the stygian darkness continued.
With the return of the pallid light, at what should have been daybreak,
Cosmo and his navigator were again at their post. In fact, the former
had not slept at all, keeping watch through the long hours, with
Captain Arms within easy call.
As the light became stronger, Cosmo said to the captain:
"Steer toward New York. I wish to see if the last of the tall buildings on
the upper heights have gone under."
"It will be very dangerous to go that way," objected Captain Arms. "There
are no landmarks, and we may strike a snag."
"Not if we are careful," replied Cosmo. "All but the highest ground is now
buried very deep."
"It is taking a fool's risk," growled Captain Arms, through his brush, but
nevertheless he obeyed.
It was true that they had nothing to go by. The air was too thick with
water, and the light too feeble for them to be able to lay their course
by sighting the distant hills of New Jersey which yet remained above the
level of the flood. Still, by a kind of seaman's instinct, Captain Arms
made his way, until he felt that he ought to venture no farther. He had
just turned to Cosmo Versál with the intention of voicing his protest
when the Ark careened slightly, shivered from stem to stern, and then
began a bumping movement that nearly threw the two men from their feet.
"We are aground!" cried the captain, and instantly turned a knob that set
in motion automatic machinery which cut off the engines from the
propellers, and at the same time slowed down the engines themselves.