un bent it like a sapling. My God! What would it do to
a man?"

"What thinkest thou of our retortii?" The Atlantean's beard glinted
like metal as he shook with a grim, silent laughter. "These great
retortii can shoot half a league and will blast any living thing in
their path. I tell thee, friend Nelson, the discharge of even a small
retortii will strip the flesh from a man's bones as a peasant strips
the husk from an ear of corn!"

"Fearful, terrible!" was Nelson's awed comment. "Is there no defence
against them?"

"Of course." The Hero's green feather-crested helmet gleamed with a
nod. "Was there ever an instrument of war that had not its defence?
Yea, we have the blue vapor to shatter steam particles--it is called
the blue maxima. Thou wilt presently see some of our troops armed with
it."

"But where does this steam come from? How is it generated?" These two
were the first of a host of questions which trembled on Nelson's lips.

"The steam," replied the Atlantean, "comes from the earth. We compress
it many times, then feed it into our retortii. Without the heat of
Mother Earth and our flame suns we would all perish. Steam is our
motive power, our defence and our enemy!"

He flung his hand towards the vast valley stretched before them. It
was hemmed in on either side by colossal breath-taking mountain
ranges, whose caps shone and glittered with an eternal snow.

"Some foothills! They must rise all of 25,000 feet from the valley
floor," decided the aviator, "and I should imagine this valley is a
good mile below sea level. Yes! That must be it: this nightmare
country lies in a huge geographical fault--something like the Dead
Sea."

* * * * *

Mile after mile he could see fertile green land stretching away toward
some low undulating hills on the horizon. Atlans was very thickly
settled--that he recognized at once--for the terrain was divided and
sub-divided into a vast checker-board, such as he had seen in France
and Germany, while terraces, green with produce, had been laboriously
gouged out of the frowning mountain sides.

Then his eye encountered the source of that curious amber light which
pervaded the whole valley. A titanic flaming gas vent spouted like a
cyclopean torch from the peak of a nearby mountain. Its steady,
subdued roar struck Nelson's ear as he turned away his eyes, for the
glare was too intense to be long endured. Further down the valley were
two more such i