had been glad to believe that we
were faced with a problem which would prove to have a human solution,
the revulsion had come, and I should have welcomed the knowledge that
some weird, freakish application of natural power might be held
accountable.

"Afraid?" queried Garnesk, with a note of surprise. "I am very often
afraid of Nature. She is a devoted slave, but a cruel mistress. I
don't think that I should ever be very much scared by a human being,
even in his most fiendish aspect, but Nature--I tell you, Ewart, there
are things in Nature that make me shudder!"

"Yes," I agreed heavily, "you're right, of course. That's how I have
felt for the past twenty-four hours. It was a tremendous relief to me
to feel that we were men looking for men. But the last few minutes I
have had an idea that it would be comforting to explain it all out of
a text-book of physics. Still, you're right. It is better far to be
men fighting men than to be puny molecules tossed in the maelstrom of
immutable power which created the world, and may one day destroy it."

"I'm glad you agree," he said simply. "You see you could not possibly
live for a second in electrically produced atmosphere which was
so thick that you couldn't hear yourself speak. Death would be
instantaneous. It couldn't have been our unknown professor's wireless
experiments after all. Yet it seems impossible that a sudden new power
should crop up suddenly at one spot like this. Imagine what would
happen if this had occurred in a city, in a crowded street. Hundreds
would have been stricken blind, then hundreds would have been
suffocated. Vehicles would have run amok, and the result would have
been an indescribable chaos of the maimed, mangled and distraught. A
flash like this green ray (which blinded Miss McLeod and her dog,
deluded the General, and nearly suffocated us) at the mouth of a
harbour, say, the entrance to a great port--Liverpool, London, or
Glasgow--would be responsible for untold loss of life. If this
terrible phenomenon spread, Ewart, it would paralyse the industry of
the world in twenty-four hours. If it spread still farther the face of
the globe would become the playing-fields of Bedlam in a moment. Think
of the result of this everywhere! Some suffocated, some blinded, and
millions probably mad and sightless, stumbling over the bodies of the
dead to cut each other's throats in the frenzy of sudden imbecility."

"Don't, Garnesk," I begged. "It won't bear think