But Flint and Waldron still survived. Though the very earth shook and
trembled with the roar of bombs, the crumbling of massive walls, the
rattle of volley-fire and the crashing of the terrible grenades that
mowed down hundreds as they spread their poisonous gas abroad--though
the shriek of projectiles, the thunder of the air-ship guns now sweeping
the sky in blind endeavor to shatter the attackers all swelled the
tumult to a frightful storm of terror and of death; they still lived,
cowered and cringed there in the bomb-proof steel-and-concrete of the
inner laboratories.
"Come, come!" Flint quavered, peering about him at the deserted room,
still glaring with electric light--the room now abandoned by all its
workers, who, members of Herzog's regiment, had run to take their posts
at the first signal of attack. "Come--this isn't safe enough, even here.
In--in there!"
He pointed toward a vault-like door, leading to the subterranean steel
chambers where Herzog eventually counted on storing some hundreds of
thousands of tons of liquid oxygen--the reserve-chambers, impregnable to
lightning, fire, frost or storm, to man's attacks or nature's--the
chambers blasted from the living rock, deep as the Falls themselves,
vacuum-lined, wondrous achievement of the highest engineering skill the
world could boast.
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