The chauffeur stopped short at a word from Gerson. “Pull up by the wayside,” directed the General, “and try and look like engine trouble.”

He got out. “We will walk to the top of the hill. The fellow standing there against the sky is our scout. And over beyond is Cayme.”

The Lord Paramount obeyed in silence.

They were perhaps a couple of hundred yards from the crest. The sun was setting, a white blaze, which rimmed the line of the hill with iridescence. For an instant the Lord Paramount glanced back at the bleakness of the Cornish landscape, coldly golden, and then turned to the ascent.

“We shall see very little until this damned sun is down,” said Gerson. “But there is no hurry now.”

“An air scout,” said the Lord Paramount.

“Theirs. They keep it circling. And they have another out to sea. But the water is opaque enough, I hope, to hide our submarines. And besides, they keep pretty far out.”

“We have submarines?”

“Five. Six we had. But one is lost. All the coast has been played hokey with. The sea bed’s coming up. God knows how they’ve done it, but they’ve raised scores of square miles. Heaved it up somehow. Our submarine must have hit a lump or barrier — which ought not to have been there. They’ve just made all this Lyonesse of theirs out of nothing — to save paying decent prices to decent landowners. They bore down through it and take out minerals — minerals we’d give our eyes to get — that were hidden under the bottom of the sea.”

The Lord Paramount regarded the huge boss of stone to the right of them with a puzzled expression.

“I seem to remember this road — that rock that sticks up there and the way the road turns round it.”

“It goes to Penzance. Or it did.”

“That old disused tin mine we passed, that too seems familiar. Something odd about the double shaft. . . . I’ve never seen this coast since I was a young man. Then I tramped it with a knapsack. By Land’s End and along here and so on to Tintagel.”

“You’ll find it changed in a moment.”

The Lord Paramount made no answer.

“Now. We’re getting into view. Stroll easily. That fellow up there may be watching us. The evening’s as still and clear as crystal. No mist. Not a cloud. We could do with a little obscurity to-night.”

“Why have we no aeroplanes up?”

Something like contempt sounded in Gerson’s voice. “Because we want to take your friends out there by surprise.”

The Lord Paramount felt again that sense of insufficiency that had been troubling him so frequently during the last few days. He had asked a silly question. More and more was Gerson with his lucid technical capacity taking control of things. There was nothing more to be said, and in silence the Lord Paramount surveyed the view that had opened out before them. Gerson was still in control.

“We had better sit down on this bank among the heather. Don’t stand still and stare. It won’t do to seem even to be watching them.”

The land was changed indeed.

Cayme was unlike any town, any factory, any normal place that Mr. Parham had ever seen. For it was Mr. Parham’s eye that now regarded it. It sat up against the incandescent sky, broad, black, squat, like some monstrous new development of the battleship. It was a low, long battleship magnified by ten. Against the light it had no form nor detail, only a hard, long shape. Its vast shadow veiled a wedge of unassimilable detail, that might be a wilderness of streams and rich pools, in gloom and mystery. The land came out to this place, shining where it caught the light, or cut into blunt denticulations by long shadows, alternated triangles of darkness, wherever there was a rock or ridge to impede the light.

“But this was sea,” said Mr. Parham.

“This was sea.”

“And away there is still Land’s End.”

“Only it isn’t Land’s End any more. This runs right out.”

“I came along here I suppose somewhere — hard now to say exactly where — and I had Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur in my knapsack. And I— I was a young man then — I looked across at the sunset — a great clear sunset like this one — and I dreamt of the lost cities and palaces of Lyonesse until almost I could see them, like a mirage, glittering under the sun.”

“And Lyonesse is here, and it hasn’t got any cities or palaces or knights. And it doesn’t glitter. And instead of King Arthur and his Table Round, you’ve got a crew of Camelford’s men, brewing God knows what treason. . . . I wish I knew. . . . I wish I knew.”

Gerson sat in silence for a space, and then he talked again, almost as much to himself as to Mr. Parham.

“There they’ve got the stuff. They’ve got it; they’ve got everything. If we can wrench that place out of their hands suddenly — we have it all. I have men who can work it all right, given the stuff. Then we shall have poison gas to scare the world stiff. . . . And we’ll scare them. . . . But swift and sure like the pounce of a cat — we must get them down before they can lift a finger. They’ll blow the place to smithereens before they let us have it. Camelford has said as much. God knows what chemists are coming to! They didn’t dare say ‘No’ to a soldier in the last Great War.”

“These coasts have changed,” said Mr. Parham, “and the world has changed. And it seems to me tonight as if God himself had changed to something strange and dreadful.”

They sat in silence. The sun which had been a white blaze had sunk down until it touched the high line of the silhouette of Cayme, and its blinding glory had become only a blazing red disk.

“Tell me,” said Mr. Parham. “What are our plans?”

Gerson glanced sideways to be sure the scout was out of earshot.

“We have all the Gas L the Empire could produce before these fellows collared the material. Just about enough for this job and no more. Further on some of it lies along the road, disguised as barrels of tar. Down in the village there, which used to be a fishing village and which now grows vegetables, keeps cows, and takes in washing for Cayme, it is piled up as barrels of beer. We have cases and cylinders hidden among the rocks.”

“But where are our men?”

“At Bodmin, at Penzance, waiting for the dark with bicycles, and, oh!— there’s a good lot about here, though you don’t see them, hidden in ditches since last night, lying under heaps of dry heather, down in that wood we passed. Waiting for a noiseless rocket at one o’clock to-night. Each one ready for his job. Behind that first line is Burchell with men in every town from Plymouth to Exeter, all hanging about unobtrusively, ready to follow up. What a man he is! What energy! Like a boy, an immense clever boy. He wouldn’t let this happen without him. Would there were more like him!”

“And at one o’clock?”

“Quietly we shift the gas into the great ditch they have round that place, see our masks are adjusted, and let it loose.”

“Which means?”

“They’ll wriggle a bit — blast ’em!”

“And then?”

“No more of them. And at dawn we go in with our gas masks on — and take possession. Like digging out a wasp’s nest.”

“Suppose the gas doesn’t work instantly — and they blow up in spite of us?”

“Then, my Lord Paramount, we are done. We’ll go back to find London selling us, and selling the Union Jack with us, to anyone who cares to buy. We’ll go back to find patriotism over and dead from China to Peru. We’ll go back to find lords and dictators, ten a penny. Or — if we respect ourselves — we won’t go back. But I think we can trust Gas L.”

Never had the Lord Paramount felt so utterly Mr. Parham. He looked about him at that evening, and it was a golden dome of warmth and stillness in which it was very good to be alive, and far off he heard some late lambs bleating and crying to the deep answers of their mothers.

“It’s quite possible the book of history will close with a bang,” said Ge............