It was several days later when Dr. Ferdinand Gresham, Ensign Hallock and myself returned to the Mare Island navy yard at San Francisco.
And there, for the first time, we learned that the world remained intact and was out of danger.
When we had ascertained that we three were the only survivors of our expedition, we had started wandering over the mountains through the semi-darkness until we found the destroyer. Unable to navigate the vessel, we had taken the hydroplane, which Hallock knew how to handle, and started south. Engine trouble had prolonged our trip.
Back from the grave, as it seemed, we listened with tremendous elation to the story of the wounded planet’s convalescence.
That last terrible upheaval, just before the destruction of the sorcerers’ power plant, had seemed for a time to be the actual beginning of the end. But, instead, it had proved to be the climax—after which the earthquakes had begun rapidly to die out. Scientists now declared that before long the earth would regain its normal stability.
With our return, the story of the Seuen-H’sin was given to the public. So universal became the horror with which that sect was regarded that an international expedition proceeded into China and dealt vigorously with the sorcerers.
The tremendous changes that had been wrought in the surface of the planet presently lost their novelty.
And New York and other cities that had been destroyed, or partially so, speedily were rebuilt.
Here I must not omit one other strange incident connected with these events.
One evening, nearly two years after our encounter with the sorcerers, Dr. Gresham and I were sitting at the window of his New York apartment, idly watching the moon rise above the range of housetops to the east of Central Park.