aring dead
level of gravel and clay. The instantaneous motor-bomb had been
arranged to act almost horizontally.

Few persons, except those who from a distance had been watching the
fort with glasses, understood what had happened; but every one in the
city and surrounding country was conscious that something had happened
of a most startling kind, and that it was over in the same instant in
which they had perceived it. Everywhere there was the noise of falling
window-glass. There were those who asserted that for an instant they
had heard in the distance a grinding crash; and there were others who
were quite sure that they had noticed what might be called a flash of
darkness, as if something had, with almost unappreciable quickness,
passed between them and the sun.

When the officers of the garrison mounted the hill before them and
surveyed the place where their fort had been, there was not one of them
who had sufficient command of himself to write a report of what had
happened. They gazed at the bare, staring flatness of the shorn bluff,
and they looked at each other. This was not war. It was something
supernatural, awful! They were not frightened; they were oppressed and
appalled. But the military discipline of their minds soon exerted its
force, and a brief account of the terrific event was transmitted to the
authorities, and Sergeant Kilsey was sentenced to a month in the
guard-house.

No one approached the vicinity of the bluff where the fort had stood,
for danger might not be over; but every possible point of observation
within a safe distance was soon crowded with anxious and terrified
observers. A feeling of awe was noticeable everywhere. If people
could have had a tangible idea of what had occurred, it would have been
different. If the sea had raged, if a vast body of water had been
thrown into the air, if a dense cloud had been suddenly ejected from
the surface of the earth, they might have formed some opinion about it.
But the instantaneous disappearance of a great fortification with a
little more appreciable accompaniment than the sudden tap, as of a
little hammer, upon thousands of window-panes, was something which
their intellects could not grasp. It was not to be expected that the
ordinary mind could appreciate the difference between the action of an
instantaneous motor when imbedded in rocks and earth, and its effect,
when opposed by nothing but stone walls, upon or near the surface of
the ea