CHAPTER VI
LEE awoke first. She remembered at once where she was, and sat up with a sense of terror she had not experienced in the darkness of the night. The fog was gone, the sun was well above the horizon. She and Cecil were alone on a mountain peak so high above the world that the blue depths of space seemed nigher than the planet below. The redwood forest at the foot of the mountain looked like brush; on a glassy pond were hundreds of toy boats; beyond was a toy city on toy hills. Far to the South another solitary peak lifted itself into the heavens, dwarfing the mountain ranges about it. Lee glanced to the left. Nothing there but peak after peak bristling away into the north, black and rigid with redwoods.
But it was not the stupendous isolation that terrified Lee. It was a vague menace in the atmosphere about her, an accentuated stillness. Over the scene was a grey web, so delicate, so transparent, that it concealed nothing. Lee rubbed her eyes to make sure it was really there. It might have been the malignant breath of the evil genius of California. As she gazed, the mist slowly cohered. It became an almost tangible veil through which San Franciscolooked the phantom of a city long since sunken to the bed of the Pacific. The sun glared through it like the suspended crater of an angry volcano. The forests on the mountain all at once seemed dead. The very air was petrified. The silence was awful, appalling.
Lee caught Cecil by the shoulder and pulled him upright.
“Something terrible is going to happen,” she gasped. “Oh, I wish we were home! I wish we were home.”
Cecil rubbed his eyes. He barely grasped the meaning of her words. There was a dull muffled roar, which seemed to spring from the depths of the planet, a terrible straining and rocking, and the very heart of the mountain leaped under them.
Cecil saw Lee make a wild dart to the left. Then he was conscious of nothing but a rapid descent amidst a hideous clatter of rock, and the sensation that he was sliding from the surface of the earth into space. Down he went, down, down, with the rumble below and the roar of loosened earth and rock about him. Inside of him he fancied he could hear the icicles of his blood rattle against each other. In his skull was a horrible vacuum.
The slide stopped abruptly. Cecil looked dully about him, wondering why the still trembling rocks had not ground him to pulp. He stumbled to his feet mechanically, worked his way beyond the slide, then climbed toward the cone from which he had been so abruptly evicted. His knowledge of what he sought was very vague, a primal instinct. Presentlyhe saw Lee running toward him. Behind her was a man in the rough garb of a mountaineer.
“It was an earthquake,” cried Lee, as she flung herself into Cecil’s arms, “and he’s going to take us home.”