“There is where those brilliant flashes in the heavens came from last night. They were due to some accident in the machinery, causing a short circuit. For two nights I had been circling over this entire range of mountains in the hydroplane, in search of the sorcerers’ workshop. The flashes were a fortunate circumstance that led me to the place.”
“At last I understand,” I remarked presently, “why you were so deeply interested, back there in Washington, in the Steamship Nippon and the electric plant she was transporting to Hong-kong. I suppose that is where the sorcerers obtained all this machinery!”
“Precisely!” agreed the astronomer. “That morning in Washington, when I got you to look up the inventory of the Nippon’s cargo, I had this solution of the mystery in mind. I knew from my years in Wu-yang that electricity was the force the sorcerers would employ, and I was certain I had seen mention in the newspapers of some exceptionally large electrical equipment aboard the Nippon. Those supposed pirates of the Yellow Sea were in reality the murderous hordes of the Seuen-H’sin, who had come out to the coast after this outfit.”
“But why,” I asked, “should these Chinamen, whose development of science is so far in advance of our own, have to get machinery from an inferior people? I should think their own appliances would have made anything from the rest of the world seem antiquated.”
“You forget what I told you that first night we spoke of the Seuen-H’sin. Their discoveries never were backed up by manufacturing; they possessed no raw materials or factories or industrial instincts. They did not need to make machinery themselves. In spite of their tremendous isolation, they were watching everything in the outside world. They knew they could get plenty of machinery ready made—once they had perfected their method of operations.”
I was still staring at the monster power plant below us when Dr. Gresham announced:
“I know now that my theory of the earthquakes’ origin was correct, and if we get safely back to the Albatross the defeat of the sorcerers’ plans is assured.”
“Tell me one thing more,” I put in. “Why did the Chinamen come so far from their own country to establish their plant?”
“Because,” the doctor replied, “this place was so hidden—yet so easy to reach. And the further they came from their own country to apply their electric impulses to the earth, the less danger their native land would run.”