ewelry store and stood within a
few feet of us, peering at us. Yet so great was the void between us
that Tako barely glanced at them. He was giving orders constantly
now. For miles around us his men on the mountains and in the valleys
were feverishly active.

* * * * *

But doing what? Don and I could only wonder. A tenseness had gripped
upon Tako. The time for his attack was nearing.

"Very presently now," he repeated. He gestured toward the great
apparition of the Empire State Building so near us.

"I am sparing that. A good place for us to mount the projector--up
there in that tall tower. You see where our mountain slope cuts
through that building? We can materialize with the projector at that
point."

The steep ramp of the mountainside upon which we were perched sloped
up and cut midway through the Empire State Building. The building's
upper portion was free of the mountain whose peaks towered to the
west. We could climb from our ledge up the ramp to the small area
where it intersected the Empire State at the building's sixtieth to
seventieth stories.

The apparitions of New York's soldiers stood in the jewelry store
with futile leveled weapons.

"They are wondering what we are doing!" Tako chuckled.

A dozen of Tako's men, unheeding the apparitions, were now busy
within a few hundred feet of us down the rocky slope. We saw at
close view, what Tako's army was busy doing everywhere. The men had
little wedge-shaped objects of a gray material. The materialization
bombs! They were placing them carefully at selected points on the
rocks, and adjusting the firing mechanisms. This group near us,
which Don and I watched with a fascinated horror, were down in the
basement of the jewelry store, among its foundations. There for a
moment; then moving out under Fifth Avenue, peering carefully at the
spectral outlines of the cellars of other structures.

Then presently Tako called an order. He stood for a moment on the
ledge with arms outstretched so that his men, and Don and I and
Jane, and the wondering apparitions of the gathered soldiers and New
York Police could see him. His moment of triumph! It marked his face
with an expression which was utterly Satanic.

Then he dropped his arms for the signal to attack.

CHAPTER XI

_The Devastation of New York_

That night of May 19th and 20th in New York City will go down in
history as the strangest, most terrible ever recorded.