dead silence.
His thoughts finished flowing toward the lake, and his foot no longer
touched water, but hung in space.

He was too stunned by the suddenness of the change to either think or
feel. While he was still lying dazed, a vast explosion occurred in the
newly opened depths beneath the lakebed. The water in its descent had
met fire. Maskull was lifted bodily in the air, many yards high, and
came down heavily. He lost consciousness....

When he came to his senses again, he saw everything. Teargeld was
gleaming brilliantly. He was lying by the side of the old lake, but it
was now a crater, to the bottom of which his eyes could not penetrate.
The hills encircling it were torn, as if by heavy gunfire. A few
thunderclouds were floating in the air at no great height, from which
branched lightning descended to the earth incessantly, accompanied by
alarming and singular crashes.

He got on his legs, and tested his actions. Finding that he was
uninjured, he first of all viewed the crater at closer quarters, and
then started to walk painfully toward the northern shore.

When he had attained the crest above the lake, the landscape sloped
gently down for two miles to the sea. Everywhere he passed through
traces of his rough work. The country was carved into scarps, grooves,
channels, and craters. He arrived at the line of low cliffs overlooking
the beach, and found that these also were partly broken down by
landslips. He got down onto the sand and stood looking over the moonlit,
agitated sea, wondering how he could contrive to escape from this island
of failure.

Then he saw Earthrid's body, lying quite close to him. It was on its
back. Both legs had been violently torn off and he could not see
them anywhere. Earthrid's teeth were buried in the flesh of his right
forearm, indicating that the man had died in unreasoning physical agony.
The skin gleamed green in the moonlight, but it was stained by darker
discolourations, which were wounds. The sand about him was dyed by the
pool of blood which had long since filtered through.

Maskull left the corpse in dismay, and walked a long way along the
sweet-smelling shore. Sitting down on a rock, he waited for daybreak.

Chapter 16. LEEHALLFAE

At midnight, when Teargeld was in the south, throwing his shadow
straight toward the sea and making everything nearly as bright as day,
he saw a great tree floating in the water, not far out. It was thirty
feet out of the water,