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stalks in a gale. A tangle of wires, like monstrous wind-blown cobwebs, hung in festoons and cluttered the ground.

Beyond, the billowing smoke, rising from a hundred fires and gilded with grandeur by the rising sun, hid the hills and the inferno which had been a busy, hopeful mart only yesterday.

The air quivered with noise. The hum of engines, the nerve-wracking barking of motor-horns, the shouting of excited searchers in the hot ruins, the uneven murmur of hysterical conversation, the continuous crackling and recurring explosions of the conflagration, the eternal thunder of the breakers upon the shore, all the pandemonium of sound which arises when Nature kicks the human hive, set the very air alive.

Harley staggered in his walk, blundering against, and apologising to, people who noticed neither his blundering nor his apologies, so intent were they upon the business of living to the full this exciting episode in their lives.

He had not slept for many hours, and a month of semi-starvation had played havoc with his powers of endurance. The noise bewildered him, and he sat upon the sea wall to shake his head in an effort to throw off an uncomfortable dizziness.

The beach itself was an unforgettable scene.

The sea had receded for a considerable distance, proof that the land in this vicinity had been thrust upwards, and the exposed sea-bottom was white with shell-fish which would presently rot in the heat of the sun and add a zymotic stench to the sickening fetor of desolation. There was laughter here, the shrill laughter of children who knelt and played about the many pools which boiled with the struggles of the small fish entrapped in them, fish which fell a ready prey to childish hands.

The higher stretches of beach were one huge refugee camp. Household furniture of all descriptions had been carried here from wrecked dwellings,