time. Indeed I could not attract
his attention, for Bickley was staring with all his eyes at the
nightmare-like spectacle which was in progress about us. Indeed no
nightmare, no wild imagination of which the mind of man is capable,
could rival the aspect of its stupendous facts.

Think of them! The unmeasured space of blackness threaded by those
globes of ghastly incandescence that now hung a while and now shot
upwards, downwards, across, apparently without origin or end, like a
stream of meteors that had gone mad. Then the travelling mountain, two
thousand feet in height, or more, with its enormous saucer-like rim
painted round with bands of lurid red and blue, and about its grinding
foot the tulip bloom of emitted flame. Then the fierce-faced Oro at his
post, his hand upon the rod, waiting, remorseless, to drown half of this
great world, with the lovely Yva standing calm-eyed like a saint in hell
and watching me above the edge of the shield which such a saint might
bear to turn aside the fiery darts of the wicked. And lastly we three
men flattened terror-stricken, against the wall.

Nightmare! Imagination! No, these pale before that scene which it was
given to our human eyes to witness.

And all the while, bending, bowing towards us--away from us--making
obeisance to the path in front as though in greeting, to the path behind
as though in farewell; instinct with a horrible life, with a hideous and
gigantic grace, that titanic Terror whirled onwards to the mark of fate.

At the moment nothing could persuade me that it was not alive and did
not know its awful mission. Visions flashed across my mind. I thought
of the peoples of the world sleeping in their beds, or going about their
business, or engaged even in the work of war. I thought of the ships
upon the seas steaming steadily towards their far-off ports. Then I
thought of what presently might happen to them, of the tremors followed
by convulsions, of the sudden crashing down of cities, such as we had
seen in the picture Yva showed us in the Temple, of the inflow of the
waters of the deep piled up in mighty waves, of the woe and desolation
as of the end of the world, and of the quiet, following death. So
I thought and in my heart prayed to the great Arch-Architect of the
Universe to stretch out His Arm to avert this fearsome ruin of His
handiwork.

Oro glared, his thin fingers tightened their grip upon the rod, his hair
and long beard seemed to bristle with fur