zops fell to
work to make rifles. Of course there was much confusion and lost
motion at first, but eventually Ja got them in hand, detailing squads
of them under competent chiefs to certain work.

"We now have a hundred expert gun-makers. On a little isolated isle we
have a great powder-factory. Near the iron-mine, which is on the
mainland, is a smelter, and on the eastern shore of Anoroc, a well
equipped ship-yard. All these industries are guarded by forts in which
several cannon are mounted and where warriors are always on guard.

"You would be surprised now, David, at the aspect of Anoroc. I am
surprised myself; it seems always to me as I compare it with the day
that I first set foot upon it from the deck of the Sari that only a
miracle could have worked the change that has taken place."

"It is a miracle," I said; it is nothing short of a miracle to
transplant all the wondrous possibilities of the twentieth century back
to the Stone Age. It is a miracle to think that only five hundred
miles of earth separate two epochs that are really ages and ages apart.

"It is stupendous, Perry! But still more stupendous is the power that
you and I wield in this great world. These people look upon us as
little less than supermen. We must show them that we are all of that.

"We must give them the best that we have, Perry."

"Yes," he agreed; "we must. I have been thinking a great deal lately
that some kind of shrapnel shell or explosive bomb would be a most
splendid innovation in their warfare. Then there are breech-loading
rifles and those with magazines that I must hasten to study out and
learn to reproduce as soon as we get settled down again; and--"

"Hold on, Perry!" I cried. "I didn't mean these sorts of things at
all. I said that we must give them the best we have. What we have
given them so far has been the worst. We have given them war and the
munitions of war. In a single day we have made their wars infinitely
more terrible and bloody than in all their past ages they have been
able to make them with their crude, primitive weapons.

"In a period that could scarcely have exceeded two outer earthly hours,
our fleet practically annihilated the largest armada of native canoes
that the Pellucidarians ever before had gathered together. We
butchered some eight thousand warriors with the twentieth-century gifts
we brought. Why, they wouldn't have killed that many warriors in the
entire duration of a dozen