CHAPTER X
THE LAST DAY OF NEW YORK
While Cosmo Versal was calculating, from the measured rise of the water,the rate of condensation of the nebula, and finding that it addedtwenty-nine trillion two hundred and ninety billion tons to the weightof the earth every minute--a computation that seemed to give him greatmental satisfaction--the metropolis of the world, whose nucleus was theisland of Manhattan, and every other town and city on the globe thatlay near the ordinary level of the sea, was swiftly sinking beneath theswelling flood.
Everywhere, over all the broad surface of the planet, a wail of despairarose from the perishing millions, beaten down by the water that pouredfrom the unpitying sky. Even on the highlands the situation was littlebetter than in the valleys. The hills seemed to have been turned into thecrests of cataracts from which torrents of water rushed down on all sides,stripping the soil from the rocks, and sending the stones and bowldersroaring and leaping into the lowlands and the gorges. Farmhouses, barns,villas, trees, animals, human beings--all were swept away together.
Only on broad elevated plateaus, where higher points rose above the generallevel, were a few of the inhabitants able to find a kind of refuge. Byseeking these high places, and sheltering themselves as best they couldamong immovable rocks, they succeeded, at least, in delaying their fate.Notwithstanding the fact that the atmosphere was filled with falling water,they could yet breathe, if they kept the rain from striking directly intheir faces. It was owing to this circumstance, and to some extraordinaryoccurrences which we shall have to relate, that the fate of the human racewas not precisely that which Cosmo Versal had predicted.
We quitted the scene in New York when the shadow of night had just fallen,and turned the gloom of the watery atmosphere into impenetrable darkness.The events of that dreadful night we shall not attempt to depict. When thehours of daylight returned, and the sun should have brightened over thedoomed city, only a faint, phosphorescent luminosity filled the sky. Itwas just sufficient to render objects dimly visible. If the enclosingnebula had remained in a cloud-like state it would have cut off all light,but having condensed into raindrops, which streamed down in parallel lines,except when sudden blasts of wind swept them into a confused mass, thesunlight was able to penetrate through the interstices, aided by thetransparency of the water, and so a slight but variable illumination wasproduced.
In this unearthly light many tall structures of the metropolis, which hadas yet escaped the effects of undermining by the rushing torrents in thestreets, towered dimly toward the sky, shedding streams of water from everycornice. Most of the buildings of only six or eight stories had alreadybeen submerged, with the exception of those that stood on the high groundsin the upper part of the island, and about Spuyten Duyvil.
In the towers and upper stories of the lofty buildings still standing inthe heart of the city, crowds of unfortunates assembled, gazing withhorror at the spectacles around them, and wringing their hands in helplessdespair. When the light brightened they could see below them the angrywater, creeping every instant closer to their places of refuge, beateninto foam by the terrible downpour, and sometimes, moved by a mysteriousimpulse, rising in sweeping waves which threatened to carry everythingbefore them.
Every few minutes one of the great structures would sway, crack, crumble,and go down into the seething flood, the cries of the lost souls beingswallowed up in the thunder of the fall. And when this occurred withinsight of neighboring towers yet intact, men and women could be seen, somewith children in their arms, madly throwing themselves from windows andledges, seeking quick death now that hope was no more!
Strange and terrible scenes were enacted in the neighborhood of what hadbeen the water-fronts. Most of the vessels moored there had been virtuallywrecked by the earlier invasion of the sea. Some had been driven upon theshore, others had careened and been swamped at their wharves. But a few hadsucceeded in cutting loose in time to get fairly afloat. Some tried to goout to sea, but were wrecked by running against obstacles, or by beingswept over the Jersey flats. Some met their end by crashing into thesubmerged pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Others steered up the courseof the Hudson River, but that had become a narrow sea, filled with floatingand tossing debris of every sort, and all landmarks being invisible, theluckless navigators lost their way, and perished, either through collisionswith other vessels, or by driving upon a rocky shore.
The fate of the gigantic building containing the offices of the municipalgovernment, which stood near the ancient City Hall, and which had been theculminating achievement of the famous epoch of "sky-scrapers," was a thingso singular, and at the same time dramatic, that in a narrative dealingwith less extraordinary events than we are obliged to record it wouldappear altogether incredible.
With its twoscore lofty stories, and its massive base, this wonderfulstructure rose above the lower quarter of the city, and dominated it, likea veritable Tower of Babel, made to defy the flood. Many thousands ofpeople evidently regarded it in that very light, and they had fled from allquarters, as soon as the great downpour began, to find refuge within itsmountainous flanks. There were men--clerks, merchants, brokers from thedowntown offices--and women and children from neighboring tenements.
By good chance, but a few weeks before, this building had been fitted witha newly invented system of lighting, by which each story was supplied withelectricity from a small dynamo of its own, and so it happened that now thelamps within were all aglow, lightening the people's hearts a little withtheir cheering radiance.
Up and up they climbed, the water ever following at their heels, from floorto floor, until ten of the great stages were submerged. But there were morethan twice as many stages yet above, and they counted them with unexpiringhope, telling one another, with the assurance of desperation, that longbefore the flood could attain so stupendous an altitude the rain wouldsurely cease, and the danger, as far as they were concerned, would passaway.
"See! See!" cries one. "It is stopping! It is coming no higher! I've beenwatching that step, and the water has stopped! It hasn't risen for tenminutes!"
"Hurrah! Hurrah!" yells the crowd behind and above. And the glad cry istaken up and reverberated from story to story until it bursts wildly outinto the rain-choked air at the very summit.
"Hurrah! Hurrah! We are saved! The flood has stopped!"
Men madly embrace each other. Women burst into tears and hug their childrento their breasts, filled with a joy and thankfulness that can find noexpression in words.
"You are wrong," says another man, crouching beside him who first spoke."It has not stopped--it is still rising."
"_What_! I tell you it _has_ stopped," snaps the other. "Look at that step!It stopped right below it."
"_You've been watching the wrong step_. It's rising!"
"You fool! Shut your mouth! I say it has _stopped_."
"No, it has not."
"It has! It has!"
"Look at _that_ step, then! See the water just now coming over it."
The obstinate optimist stares a moment, turns pale, and then, with an oath,strikes his more clear-headed neighbor in the face! And the excited crowdbehind, with the blind instinctive feeling that, somehow, he has robbedthem of the hope which was but now as the breath of life to them, strikehim and curse him, too.
But he had seen only too clearly.
With the steady march of fate--two inches a minute, as Cosmo Versal hadaccurately measured it--the water still advances and climbs upward.
In a little while they were driven to another story, and then to another.But hope would not down. They could not believe that the glad news, whichhad so recently filled them with joy, was altogether false. The water_must_ have stopped rising _once_; it had been _seen_. Then, it wouldsurely stop _again_, stop to rise no more.
Poor deluded creatures! With the love of life so strong within them, theycould not picture, in their affrighted minds, the terrible consummation towhich they were being slowly driven, when, jammed into the narrow chambersat the
very top of the mighty structure, their remorseless enemy wouldseize them at last.
But they were nearer the end than they could have imagined even if they hadaccepted and coolly reasoned upon the facts that were so plain before them.And, after all, it was not to come upon them only after they had foughttheir way to the highest loft and into the last corner.
A link of this strange chain of fatal events now carries us to the spotwhere the United States Navy Yard in Brooklyn once existed. That place wassunk deep beneath the waters. All of the cruisers, battleships, and othervessels that had been at anchor or at moorings there had gone under. Oneonly, the boast of the American navy, the unconquerable _Uncle Sam_, which,in the last great war that the world had known, had borne the starry flagto victories whose names broke men's voices and filled their eyes withtears of pride, had escaped, through the incomparable seamanship of CaptainRobert Decatur, who had been her commander for thirty years.
But though the _Uncle Sam_ managed to float upon the rising flood, shewas unable to get away because of the obstructions lodged about the greatbridges that spanned the East River. A curious eddy that the ragingcurrents formed over what was once the widest part of that stream kepther revolving round and round, never departing far in any direction,and, with majestic strength, riding down or brushing aside the floatingtimbers, wooden houses, and other wreckage that pounded furiously againsther mighty steel sides.
Just at the time when the waters had mounted to the eighteenth story of thebeleaguered Municipal Building, a sudden change occurred in these currents.They swept westward with resistless force, and the _Uncle Sam_ wascarried directly over the drowned city. First she encountered the cables ofthe Manhattan Bridge, striking them near the western tower, and, swinginground, wrenched the tower itself from its foundations and hurled it beneaththe waters.
Then she rushed on, riding with the turbid flood high above the buriedroofs, finding no other obstruction in her way until she approached theMunicipal Building, which was stoutly resisting the push of the waves.
"THE GREAT BATTLESHIP... CRASHED, PROW ON, INTO THESTEEL-RIBBED WALLS"]
Those who were near the windows and on the balconies, on the eastern sideof the building, saw the great battleship coming out of the gray gloomlike some diluvian monster, and before they could comprehend what it was,it crashed, prow on, into the steel-ribbed walls, driving them in as ifthey had been the armored sides of an enemy.
So tremendous was the momentum of the striking mass that the huge vesselpassed, like a projectile, through walls and floors and partitions. But asshe emerged in the central court the whole vast structure came thunderingdown upon her, and ship and building together sank beneath the boilingwaves.
But out of the awful tangle of steel girders, that whipped the air and thewater as if some terrible spidery life yet clung to them, by one of thosemiracles of chance which defy all the laws of probability and reason, asmall boat of levium, that had belonged to the _Uncle Sam_, was cast forth,and floated away, half submerged but unsinkable; and clinging to itsthwarts, struggling for breath, insane with terror, were two men, the solesurvivors of all those thousands.
One of them was a seaman who had taken refuge, with a crowd of comrades,in the boat before the battleship rushed down upon the building. All ofhis comrades had been hurled out and lost when the blow came, while hispresent companion was swept in and lodged against the thwarts. And sothose two waifs drove off in the raging waves. Both of them were bleedingfrom many wounds, but they had no fatal hurts.
The boat, though filled with water, was so light that it could not sink.Moreover, it was ballasted, and amid all its wild gyrations it kept rightside up. Even the ceaseless downpour from the sky could not drive itbeneath the waves.
After a while the currents that had been setting westward changed theirdirection, and the boat was driven toward the north. It swept on pasttoppling skyscrapers until it was over the place where Madison Square oncespread its lawns, looked down upon by gigantic structures, most of whichhad now either crumbled and disappeared or were swaying to their fall. Herethere was an eddy, and the boat turned round and round amid floating debrisuntil two other draggled creatures, who had been clinging to floatingobjects, succeeded by desperate efforts in pulling themselves into it.Others tried but failed, and no one lent a helping hand. Those who werealready in the boat neither opposed nor aided the efforts of those whobattled to enter it. No words were heard in the fearful uproar--onlyinarticulate cries.
Suddenly the current changed again, and the boat, with its dazed occupants,was hurried off in the direction of the Hudson. Night was now beginningonce more to drop an obscuring curtain over the scene, and under thatcurtain the last throes of drowning New York were hidden. When the sunagain faintly illuminated the western hemisphere the whole Atlanticseaboard was buried under the sea.
As the water rose higher, Cosmo Versal's Ark at last left its cradle, andcumbrously floated off, moving first eastward, then turning in thedirection of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Cosmo had his engines in operation,but their full power was not developed as soon as he had expected, andthe great vessel drifted at the will of the currents and the wind, thelatter coming now from one side and now from another, rising at times tohurricane strength and then dying away until only a spanking breeze sweptthe ever-falling rain into swishing sheets. Occasionally the wind failedentirely, and for many minutes at a time the water fell in verticalstreams.
At length the motive power of the Ark was developed, and it began to obeyits helm. From the shelter of a "captain's bridge," constructed at theforward end of the huge levium dome that covered the vessel, Cosmo Versal,with Captain Arms, a liberally bewhiskered, veteran navigator in whoseskill he confided, peered over the interminable waste of waters. There wasnothing in sight except floating objects that had welled up from thedrowned city and the surrounding villages. Here and there the body of ananimal or a human being was seen in the tossing waves, and Cosmo Versalsadly shook his head as he pointed them out, but the stout mariner at hisside chewed his tobacco, and paid attention only to his duties, shoutingorders from time to time through a speaking-tube, or touching an electricbutton.
Cosmo Versal brought a rain-gage and again and again allowed it to fillitself. The story was always the same--two inches per minute, ten feet perhour, the water mounted.
The nebula had settled down to regular work, and, if Cosmo's calculationswere sound, there would be no intermission for four months.
After the power of the propellers had been developed the Ark was steeredsoutheastward. Its progress was very slow. In the course of eight hoursit had not gone more than fifty miles. The night came on, and the speedwas reduced until there was only sufficient way to insure the command ofthe vessel's movements. Powerful searchlights were employed as long asthe stygian darkness continued.
With the return of the pallid light, at what should have been daybreak,Cosmo and his navigator were again at their post. In fact, the formerhad not slept at all, keeping watch through the long hours, withCaptain Arms within easy call.
As the light became stronger, Cosmo said to the captain:
"Steer toward New York. I wish to see if the last of the tall buildings onthe upper heights have gone under."
"It will be very dangerous to go that way," objected Captain Arms. "Thereare no landmarks, and we may strike a snag."
"Not if we are careful," replied Cosmo. "All but the highest ground is nowburied very deep."
"It is taking a fool's risk," growled Captain Arms, through his brush, butnevertheless he obeyed.
It was true that they had nothing to go by. The air was too thick withwater, and the light too feeble for them to be able to lay their courseby sighting the distant hills of New Jersey which yet remained above thelevel of the flood. Still, by a kind of seaman's instinct, Captain Armsmade his way, until he felt that he ought to venture no farther. He hadjust turned to Cosmo Versal with the intention of voicing his protestwhen the Ark careened slightly, shivered from stem to stern, and thenbegan a
bumping movement that nearly threw the two men from their feet.
"We are aground!" cried the captain, and instantly turned a knob that setin motion automatic machinery which cut off the engines from thepropellers, and at the same time slowed down the engines themselves.