But when the retreating throngs drew near the shores of the Sound, and the East River, which had expanded into a true arm of the sea, and found that there had been a perceptible rise since they set out to capture the ark, they began to shake their heads and fear once more entered their hearts.
Thousands then and there resolved that they would not lose another instant in setting out for high land, up the Hudson, in Connecticut, among the hills of New Jersey. In fact, many had already fled thither, some escaping on aeros; and hosts would now have followed but for a marvelous change that came just before nightfall and prevented them.
For some days the heavens had alternately darkened and lightened, as gushes of mist came and went, but there had been no actual rain. Now, without warning, a steady downpour began. Even at the beginning it would have been called, in ordinary times, a veritable cloudburst; but it rapidly grew worse and worse, until there was no word in the vernacular or in the terminology of science to describe it.
It seemed, in truth, that "all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened." The water thundered upon the roofs, and poured off them in torrents. In five minutes every sloping street had become an angry river, and every level place a swelling lake. People caught out of doors were almost beaten to the ground by the force of the water falling upon them as if they had been standing under a cataract.
In a short time every cellar and every basement was filled to overflowing, and in the avenues the flood, lapping every instant higher upon the doorsteps and the walls, rushed by with frightful roarings, bearing in its awful embrace pieces of furniture, clothing, bedding, washed out of ground-floor rooms—and, alas! human beings; some motionless, already mercifully deprived of life, but others struggling and shouting for aid which could not be given.
So terrible a spectacle no one had ever looked upon, no one had ever imagined. Those who beheld it were too stunned to cry out, too overwhelmed with terror and horror to utter a word. They stood, or fell into chairs or upon the floor, trembling in every limb, with staring eyes and drooping jaws, passively awaiting their fate.
As night came on there was no light. The awful darkness of the third sign once more settled upon the great city, but now it was not the terror of indefinite expectation that crushed down the souls of men and women—it was the weight of doom accomplished!
There was no longer any room for self-deception; every quaking heart felt now that the nebula had come. Cosmo Versál had been right!
After the water had attained a certain height in the streets and yards, depending upon the ratio between the amount descending from the sky and that which could find its way to the rivers, the flood for the time being rose no higher. The actual drowning of New York could not happen until the Hudson and the East River should become so swollen that the water would stand above the level of the highest buildings, and turn the whole region round about, as far as the Orange hills, the Ramapo Mountains, the Highlands, and the Housatonic hills, into an inland sea.
But before we tell that story we must return to see what was going on at Mineola. Cosmo Versál, on that awful night when New York first knew beyond the shadow of a doubt, or the gleam of a hope, that it was doomed, presided over a remarkable assembly in the grand saloon of his ark.