Shifting Seas

It developed later that Ted Welling was one of the very few
eye-witnesses of the catastrophe, or rather, that among the million and
a half eye-witnesses, he was among the half dozen that survived. At the
time, he was completely unaware of the extent of the disaster, although
it looked bad enough to him in all truth!

He was in a Colquist gyro, just north of the spot where Lake Nicaragua
drains its brown overflow into the San Juan, and was bound for Managua,
seventy-five miles north and west across the great inland sea. Below
him, quite audible above the muffled whir of his motor, sounded the
intermittent clicking of his tripanoramic camera, adjusted delicately to
his speed so that its pictures could be assembled into a beautiful
relief map of the terrain over which he passed. That, in fact, was the
sole purpose of his flight; he had left San Juan del Norte early that
morning to traverse the route of the proposed Nicaragua Canal, flying
for the Topographical branch of the U. S. Geological Survey. The United
States, of course, had owned the rights to the route since early in the
century--a safeguard against any other nation's aspirations to construct
a competitor for the Panama Canal.

Now, however, the Nicaragua Canal was actually under consideration. The
over-burdened ditch that crossed the Isthmus was groaning under vastly
increased traffic, and it became a question of either cutting the vast
trench another eighty-five feet to sea-level or opening an alternate
passage. The Nicaragua route was feasible enough; there was the San Juan
emptying from the great lake into the Atlantic, and there was Lake
Managua a dozen miles or so from the Pacific. It was simply a matter of
choice, and Ted Welling, of the Topographical Service of the Geological
Survey, was doing his part to aid the choice.

At precisely 10:40 it happened. Ted was gazing idly through a faintly
misty morning toward Ometepec, its cone of a peak plumed by dusky smoke.
A hundred miles away, across both Lake Nicaragua and Lake Managua, the
fiery mountain was easily visible from his altitude. All week, he knew,
it had been rumbling and smoking, but now, as he watched it, it burst
like a mighty Roman candle.

There was a flash of white fire not less brilliant than the sun. There
was a column of smoke with a red core that spouted upward like a
fountain and then mushroomed out. There was a moment of utter silence in
which the camera clicked methodically, and then there was a roar as if
the very roof of Hell had blown away to let out the bellows of the
damned!

Ted had one amazed thought--the sound had followed too quickly on the
eruption! It should have taken minutes to reach him at that
distance==and then his thoughts were forcibly diverted as the Colquist
tossed and skittered like a leaf in a hurricane. He caught an astonished
glimpse of the terrain below, of Lake Nicaragua heaving and boiling as
if it were the seas that lash through the Straits of Magellan instead of
a body of landlocked fresh water. On the shore to the east a colossal
wave was breaking, and there in a banana grove frightened figures were
scampering away. And then, exactly as if by magic, a white mist
condensed about him, shutting out all view of the world below.

He fought grimly for altitude. He had had three thousand feet, but now,
tossed in this wild ocean of fog, of up-drafts and down-drafts, of
pockets and humps, he had no idea at all of his position. His altimeter
needle quivered and jumped in the changing pressure, his compass spun,
and he had not the vaguest conception of the direction of the ground. So
he struggled as best he could, listening anxiously to the changing whine
of his blades as strain grew and lessened. And below, deep as thunder,
came intermittent rumblings that were, unless he imagined it,
accompanied by the flash of jagged fires.