“W-w-what would you advise?” Moawha asked of Epworth with much anxiety. “Never before have my soldiers been this far, and it seems to me if the crickets pour out of that hole over our heads, armed as that giant asserts they will be, they can creep upon us when we are asleep, and totally annihilate my forces.”
“It is a serious problem,” Epworth replied thoughtfully. “You say that you have a million fighting men?”
“About that number.”
“Then we’ve got to go up into that hole, and clean out that nest before Toplinsky has time to arm them. Give him three weeks and he will certainly destroy your country.”
CHAPTER XXVI
Writhing, Wriggling Ramphs
To prevent Toplinsky from sending a swarm of crickets out of the crater hole Epworth planted an army beneath the opening. The soldiers were armed with the longest range chloroform guns, and many of them were placed on the mountains that thrust up their summits near the crater. Then the young man turned his attention to solving the problem of seeing in the dark.
Tearing apart the cavern lamps he had hidden when he left his glider at this place he called in the brightest of the Selinite scientists and studied the lamps carefully. Fortunately he had worked with ofen glass in his aviation work, and now he discovered that the outer lens of the lamps were made of this quartz glass, and the scientists informed him that behind the glass had been placed a coat of rhodamine dye. Thus an invisible image had been formed by ultra violet rays, and had been held by the rhodamine dye in a way that the darkness could not dissolve the image before it reached the eye.
When this discovery was made and the secret of the cavern lamps exposed he ordered two hundred thousand cavern lamps made as quickly as possible.
While he was doing this Toplinsky came down near the crater opening on the back of a crawling cricket, discovered the army camped beneath him, and dropped two large bombs on the Selinites.
“That’s just a reminder,” the giant shouted through a huge megaphone, “that I am getting busy. In two weeks—ah, ha! perhaps in two weeks—I shall come again.” The Selinites shot up at him and his crickets with their chloroform guns, and were rewarded by a loud laugh, and then silence.