catch every aspect of the damage.

There was no doubt an area of approximately four square miles had been
utterly cleaned of the weed and a further zone nine times that size had
been smashed and riven, the grass there torn and mangled--in all
probability deprived of life. Successive reconnoitering showed no
changes in the annihilated center, but on the tenth day after the
explosion a most startling observation of the peripheral region was
made. It had turned a brilliant orange.

Not a brown or yellow, or any of the various shades of decay which
Bermuda in its original form took on at times, but a glowing and
unearthly, jewellike blaze.

The strange color was strictly confined to the devastated edge of the
bombcrater; airmen flying low could see its distinction from the rest of
the mass clear and sharp. In the center, nothing; around it, the weird
orange; and beyond, the usual and accustomed green.

But on second look, not quite usual, not quite accustomed. The
inoculated grass had always been a shade or two more intense than
ordinary _Cynodon dactylon_; this, just beyond the orange, was still
more brilliant. Not only that, but it behaved unaccountably. It writhed
and spumed upward in great clumps, culminating in enormous, overhanging
caps inevitably suggesting the mushroomcloud of the bomb.

The grass had always been cautious of the sea; now the dazzling growth
plunged into the saltwater with frenzy, leaping and building upon
itself. Great masses of vegetation, piers, causeways, isthmuses of grass
offered the illusion of growing out of the ocean bottom, linking
themselves to the land, extending too late the lost coast far out into
the Pacific.

But this was far from the last aftereffect. Though attention had
naturally been diverted from the orange band to the eccentric behavior
of the contiguous grass, it did not go unobserved and about a week after
its first change of color it seemed to be losing its unnatural hue and
turning green again.

Not the green of the great mass, nor of the queer periphery, nor of
uninspired devilgrass. It was a green unknown in living plant before; a
glassy, translucent green, the green of a cathedral window in the
moonlight. By contrast, the widening circle about it seemed subdued and
orderly. The fantastic shapes, the tortured writhings, the unnatural
extensions into the ocean were no longer manifest, instead, for miles
around the ravaged spot where the bomb had been dropped, the gr