With its twoscore lofty stories, and its massive base, this wonderful structure rose above the lower quarter of the city, and dominated it, like a veritable Tower of Babel, made to defy the flood. Many thousands of people evidently regarded it in that very light, and they had fled from all quarters, as soon as the great downpour began, to find refuge within its mountainous flanks. There were men—clerks, merchants, brokers from the downtown offices—and women and children from neighboring tenements.
By good chance, but a few weeks before, this building had been fitted with a newly invented system of lighting, by which each story was supplied with electricity from a small dynamo of its own, and so it happened that now the lamps within were all aglow, lightening the people's hearts a little with their cheering radiance.
Up and up they climbed, the water ever following at their heels, from floor to floor, until ten of the great stages were submerged. But there were more than twice as many stages yet above, and they counted them with unexpiring hope, telling one another, with the assurance of desperation, that long before the flood could attain so stupendous an altitude the rain would surely cease, and the danger, as far as they were concerned, would pass away.
"See! See!" cries one. "It is stopping! It is coming no higher! I've been watching that step, and the water has stopped! It hasn't risen for ten minutes!"
"Hurrah! Hurrah!" yells the crowd behind and above. And the glad cry is taken up and reverberated from story to story until it bursts wildly out into the rain-choked air at the very summit.
"Hurrah! Hurrah! We are saved! The flood has stopped!"
Men madly embrace each other. Women burst into tears and hug their children to their breasts, filled with a joy and thankfulness that can find no expression in words.
"You are wrong," says another man, crouching beside him who first spoke.
"It has not stopped—it is still rising."
"What! I tell you it has stopped," snaps the other. "Look at that step! It stopped right below it."
"You've been watching the wrong step. It's rising!"