a terrible shock that hurled me up against the side of the compartment. A dull, red glow poured through the port-hole, lighting up the interior with a weird, bloody reflection. I crept painfully up to the port-hole and looked out. The strangest sight that man has ever looked upon met my eyes. The side of the wall had blown out into a gigantic cavern, and with it the rest of the cars had rolled down the bluff a tangled, twisted mass of steel. My car had almost passed by, and now it still stuck in the tube, even though the last port-hole through which I peered seemed to be suspended in air. But it was not the wrecked cars from which rose such wails of despair and agony that held my attention, but the cavern itself. For it was not really a cave, but a vast underground city whose wide, marble streets stretched away to an inferno of flame and lava. By the terrible light was lit up a great white palace with its gold-tipped scrolls, and closer to me, the golden temple of the Sun, with its tiers of lustrous yellow stairs—stairs worn by the feet of many generations.

Above the stairs towered the great statue of a man on horseback. He was dressed in a sort of tunic, and in his uplifted arm he carried a scroll as if for the people to read. His face was turned toward me, and I marveled even in that wild moment that the unknown sculptor could have caught such an expression of appeal. I can see the high intellectual brow as if it were before me at this moment—the level, sympathetic eyes and the firm chin.

Then something moving caught my eyes, and I swear I saw a child—a living child coming from the burning city—running madly, breathlessly from a wave of glowing lava that threatened to engulf him at any moment. In spite of all the ridicule that has been showered upon me, I still declare that the child did not come from the wreckage and that he wore a tunic similar to the one of the statue and not the torn bit of a nightgown or sheet.

He was some distance from me, but I could plainly see his expression of wild distraction as he began to climb those gleaming stairs. Strangely lustrous in the weird light, was that worn stairway of gold—gold, the ancient metal of the Sun. With the slowness of one about to faint he dragged himself up, while his breath seemed to be torn from his throat in agonizing gasps. Behind him, the glowing liquid splashed against the steps and the yellow metal of the Sun began to drip into its fiery cauldron.

The child reached the leg of the horse and clung there.

... Then suddenly the whole scene began to shake as if I had been looking at a mirage, while just behind my car I had a flashing glimpse in that lurid light of an emerald-green deluge bursting in like a dark sky of solid water, and in that split-second before a crushing blow upon my back, even through that tangle of bedclothes, knocked me into unconsciousness, I seemed to hear again the hopeless note in the voice of my friend as he said:

"—an earthquake fault."

After what seemed to me aeons of strange, buzzing noises and peculiar lights, I at last made out the objects around me as those of a hospital. Men with serious faces were watching me. I have since been told that I babbled incoherently about "saving the little fellow" and other equally incomprehensible murmurings. From them I learned that the train the other way was washed out, a tangled mass of wreckage just like my car, both terminus stations wrecked utterly, and no one found alive except myself. So, although I am to be a hopeless cripple, yet I am not sorry that the skill and untiring patience of the great English surgeon, Dr. Thompson, managed to nurse back the feeble spark of my life through all those weeks that I hung on the borderland; for if he had not, the world never would have known.

As it is, I wonder over the events of that night as if it had not been an experience at all—but a wild weird dream. Even the gentleman with the mass of silver hair is a mystery, for he was never