"A moment we humans stared at these strange figures, in sickened horror, while those outside watched us carefully through the clear door, ready to open it and send the destroying floods in upon us at any wrong move on our part. Then one of the three, with a long, slender rod in his grasp, moved to the metal wall of our prison and drew a sketch, or diagram, of sea and land, with slug-like creatures at the sea's bottom and erect, manlike ones upon the land. He pointed from the former to himself, and from the latter to us, and I stepped forward and repeated his gesture to show our understanding.
"With this beginning he worked on, with other sketches and diagrams, establishing a slender line of communication between us, while those of our party watched in fascinated horror. At the end of an hour or more of this the things left us, through the vestibule-chamber, leaving us all in a strange state of wonder and fear. There was but little conversation on the part of any of us, and though we examined our prison carefully there seemed no chance whatever for escape; so the hours that followed passed in a semi-lassitude and silence, broken only by a sketchy meal from our own stores, after which most of our party resigned themselves to sleep. The air, we noted, remained quite pure, and was apparently made artificially by these creatures in some way, and pumped to us from outside.
"The next day passed in the same way, and the next, and the next, strange nightless and dawnless days, eternally lit by the perpetual white radiance, which followed one another like the time-periods of a dream. In those days, however, the creatures who were our captors persisted in endeavoring to establish communication with us, for their own purposes, and gradually Lewis and I attained to an exchange of ideas with them. Their purpose, we found, was to question us concerning the world above, particularly concerning our nations and cities and their relation to the sea. We did not understand the purpose of those questions, then, but bit by bit during that exchange of ideas we came to learn something of their own history and plans, and began at last to understand what terrible peril was hanging above our world.
"These creatures, as we had guessed, were native to the sea as man is native to the land, developed from the lower forms of sea-creatures in the remote past just as man developed from the lower land ones. Life began in the sea, as you know, and these slug-beings had developed into intelligence and power while man was still a half-ape roaming the barren plains. They had built their great globe-cities at the sea's bottom, and for their greater convenience had lit them with the light-producing mechanisms on the globes, which set up a permanent excitation or vibration of the ether, of a frequency that formed perpetual light-vibrations. In their hidden depths they reigned, lords of the sea.
"But their domains were steadily diminishing. You know that since the dawn of time earth's seas have dwindled steadily, following the laws of molecular motion, that slowly those seas have retreated and dwindled, as on every planet they do, as on Mars they did eons ago. And since the slug-people could live only in the terrific pressures of the great depths their own realms were swiftly shrinking. They must either form some plan to halt the dwindling of the seas, or face certain extinction.
"They finally, after long discussion, adopted a stupendous plan, which was none other than to produce artificially such vast quantities of water as would replenish the dwindled seas, would cover all earth miles deep with them and give all earth as the slug-people's domain. They knew, in their science, how to form atoms of any element out of the primal ether itself by raising it to the desired frequency of vibration. Just as they had produced light from the ether they could produce matter, which is but a vibration of the universal ether. Suppose, then, that they set up vast generators to form immense quantities of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and suppose those tremendous quantities of hydrogen and oxygen were mixed together, with a small proportion of certain chemicals added. The result would be that from the generators immense quantities of sea water would be shot forth to add to the sea's bulk, to cause it to rise until it covered the highest peaks. They needed only to make generators of sufficient size and number, and at this they set to work.
"They set to work, and for the sake of convenience they built their vast generators under their own cities, which were located in all the great deeps of the sea over earth, in the Atlantic and Pacific and Indian oceans, vast cities with countless hordes of the slug-creatures. Under each of their cities lay one of the titanic generators, with a vast pit-opening at the city's center for the waters that would be formed to issue forth from beneath. It was a work of centuries, of ages, this building of the great generators, one beside which the building of the pyramids was but the task of an hour. Man rose to power on earth above them, never suspecting their presence, even, and still in the depths the slug-creatures worked on at their great task, that was to give them all the world.
"At last the great generators, under the cities of the slug-people in all the deeps of the sea, approached completion. It was necessary to provide a single control for all of them, so that all could be turned on at the same moment, since otherwise the inequality of currents might produce too great disturbances of the sea. This control, therefore, was placed in a small room at the top of a great spire at the center of one of their cities in the deeps of the mid-Atlantic, the city which we had discovered and where we were prisoned. And now, as we learned, the great work was almost finished, and soon the generators which had taken ages to build would be put into action. Around the spire which held the control of all the generators there watched always their giant striding-machines, since this little room at the spire's tip held all the energies of all their generators on earth centered inside it, and should it be damaged or wrecked the generators themselves would run wild, resulting in titanic etheric explosions which would inevitably destroy not only all the generators themselves but also the great cities built upon them, and the numberless slug-people of those cities.
"In sick despair we watched the days passing, cooped in our little prison, while the plans of the slug-people came to their climax. Far above us, we knew, were sunlight, and fresh breezes, and ships going to and fro upon the waters, but around us were only the oppressing waters and the white radiance and the city of globes and its unhuman people. And at last the age-old plans of those people were finished, and the great generators were turned on. We saw them flocking through the streets toward the great spire and the vast pit, saw a gleam of sudden green radiance from the control room at the spire's top, in the distance; and then there was a great quivering of the ground and the waters about us, and up from the pit there shot with immense force and speed a vast current of waters, a tremendous solid stream two miles wide and of terrific speed, formed we knew by the combining elements in the vast generator beneath the city, turning each moment millions of tons of water into the seas above us. And we knew, too, that at that moment in all the other cities of the slug-people across all the deeps of the sea, other and similar currents were being shot forth by the titanic generators, adding each moment incalculable amounts to the bulk of the seas.