The Camp in the Crater
The next I knew, it was late in the evening. The sun was low over the black hills in the west. My machine was still perhaps two miles high, and floating slowly down. I started the motor, and got the machine under control.
I found that I had drifted far to the east of the mine. By the time the red sun set, I was back over it. I landed in a terrible scene of wreckage. All objects of iron—machines and weapons—were gone. Trenches, shelters, and buildings were stripped ruins. Here and there were dead men, singly and in piles. They showed no wounds; either they had been killed by the intense radioactivity of the gravity bombs, or by a Vernon Ray machine carried on the red planes.
I landed by the ruined residence, near two dead men in uniform. In fearful anticipation, I hurried through the silent rooms. The doors were broken down and the walls were bullet-splintered—there had been fighting in the hall. I searched the empty rooms in which the precious thorium had been stored. Three more cold bodies I found, but they were of the Mexican soldiery. I found no trace of Ellen, Bill, or the Doctor.
Had they been swept away into space? Or had the triumphant lunatic, Vars, taken them captive and carried them to his stronghold in the crater of Mocolynatal?
I did not find the Doctor, but in his laboratory, in the inside pocket of a coat carelessly thrown aside, I found the compact little ray tube with which he had bleached the flowers on the day before. I examined it curiously, and put it in my pocket.
Darkness had fallen when I went out to the Camel-back, got in, and started the turbine motor. I rose into the night and flew northward over the starlit mountain wilderness. At last I made out the shape of Mocolynatal ahead, and climbed far above it. I sailed over, and came upon a strange scene.
Indeed, the mountain had a crater! Below me was a great bowl, perhaps two miles across, brilliantly lit by rows of electric lights. I made out long lines of buildings—huge structures of sheet iron, gleaming in the light. Toward the south rim seemed to be a landing field, with broad beams of intense light pouring out over the hundreds of red planes lined up across it. North of that was a lake, and I saw scores of red seaplanes moored by brightly lit docks at the edge.
There was movement below me. I saw the headlights of moving trucks upon smooth gravel roads about the lake, and there were men at work on the docks and at the landing field. Dense smoke, a luminous white in the glare of the lights, was rising from some of the buildings that must have been factories.