I wouldn't be astonished now to find
that their whole old planet was hollow, and full of gnomes, or whatever
you call 'em."
When we got nearer we saw that Edmund's description was substantially
correct. The vast mass of water gushed from the top of a broad plateau,
in the form of a gigantic vertical fountain, with a roar so stupendous
that Ala and her attendants immediately covered their ears with
protectors, and we should not have been sorry to follow their example,
for our eardrums were almost burst by the billowing force of the sound
waves. The water shot upward four or five hundred feet with geyser-like
plumes reaching a thousand feet, and then descended in floods on all
sides. But the slope of the ground was such that eventually it was all
collected in a river, which flowed away with great swiftness, past the
distant city, and disappeared in the direction of the sea from which we
had come. The solid column of rising water must have been, at its base,
three hundred feet in diameter!
But our amazement was redoubled when we recognized, at various points of
vantage, squat, metallic towers of enormous strength, which caught the
descending water, allowing it to issue in roaring torrents from their
bases.
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