A gaping hole fifty feet in diameter marked the place where the carefully-screened quick-firers had been.
Round the edge of the crater were smouldering sand-bags hurled in all directions like small pebbles. The two guns, dismounted, were sticking up at acute angles in the debris, their mountings shattered into fragments of scrap-iron metal.
There was no sign of life in the crater, nor in the partly uncovered dug-outs in its vicinity, but from a neighbouring position poured swarms of Germans, half-dazed and terrified by the explosion that had shaken their subterranean retreat like a severe earthquake shock.
The Paradox had completed her particular job.
Meanwhile a second sea-plane was registering for the Crustacean, her guns being directed upon the piers on which the Pelikan's torpedo-tubes had been placed.
Without once coming within sight of her objective the little monitor effected her mission with two shots, blowing both torpedo-stations to smithereens.
Nor was the Eureka less successful. A shell fired in front of the crowd of demoralized Germans as they fled through the mangroves literally roped them in. Panic-stricken they doubled back and disappeared in the dug-outs close to the wrecked emplacements, and the Eureka, having been accordingly informed, ceased firing.
"Now for the Pelikan!" exclaimed Stirling, as the sea-plane, having returned, put Denbigh on board the Crustacean.
"It will be an affair of boats, I suppose," suggested O'Hara. "With the flood-tide and on a dark night she ought to be captured with little loss to the boarding-party."
Two of the monitors were lying at anchor in the river. The Eureka, having to watch the coast, steamed slowly up and down the lagoon, her progress watched by hundreds of awe-stricken natives.