ion after the
disarmament of the nations. But could the nations have seen the
expedition as it emerged from its boarding-house that September morning
they would have rubbed their eyes.

With the utmost difficulty Prof. Bennie Hooker negotiated his bags and
rod cases as far as Harvard Square, where, through the assistance of a
friendly conductor with a sense of humour, he was enabled to board an
electric surface car to the North Station.

Beyond the start up the River Moisie his imagination refused to carry
him. But he had a faith that approximated certainty that over the Height
of Land--just over the edge--he would find Pax and the Flying Ring.
During all the period required for his experiments and preparations he
had never once glanced at a newspaper or inquired as to the progress of
the war that was rapidly exterminating the inhabitants of the globe.
Thermic induction, atomic disintegration, the Lavender Ray, these were
the Alpha, the Sigma, the Omega of his existence.

But meantime[3] the war had gone on with all its concomitant horror,
suffering, and loss of life, and the representatives of the nations
assembled at Washington had been feverishly attempting to unite upon the
terms of a universal treaty that should end militarism and war forever.
And thereafter, also, although Professor Hooker was sublimely
unconscious of the fact, the celebrated conclave, known as Conference
No. 2, composed of the best-known scientific men from every laud, was
sitting, perspiring, in the great lecture hall of the Smithsonian
Institution, its members shouting at one another in a dozen different
languages, telling each other what they did and didn't know, and
becoming more and more confused and entangled in an underbrush of
contradictory facts and observations and irreconcilable theories until
they were making no progress whatever--which was precisely what the
astute and plausible Count von Koenitz, the German Ambassador, had
planned and intended.

[Footnote 3: Up to the date of the armistice.]

The Flying Ring did not again appear, and in spite of the uncontroverted
testimony of Acting-Consul Quinn, Mohammed Ben Ali el Bad, and a
thousand others who had actually seen the Lavender Ray, people began
gradually, almost unconsciously, to assume that the destruction of the
Atlas Mountains had been the work of an unsuspected volcano and that the
presence of the Flying Ring had been a coincidence and not the cause of
the disruption. So