When the World Shook (The Radium Age Science Fiction Series, Band 4) - Softcover

H. Rider Haggard was a popular English writer of adventure novels set in exotic locations, including King Solomon's Mines (considered one of the first of the Lost World genre) and She. When The World Shook, which features suspended animation and a machine capable of changing the tilt of the earth, is the most science-fictional of his writings.

James Parker was born in London in 1968. He is the author of Turned On: A Biography of Henry Rollins and a contributing editor at The Atlantic.

Think of them! The unmeasured space of blackness threaded by those globes of ghastly incandescence that now hung a while and now shot upwards, downwards, across, apparently without origin or end, like a stream of meteors that had gone mad. Then the travelling mountain, two thousand feet in height, or more, with its enormous saucer-like rim painted round with bands of lurid red and blue, and about its grinding foot the tulip bloom of emitted flame. Then the fierce-faced Oro at his post, his hand upon the rod, waiting, remorseless, to drown half of this great world, with the lovely Yva standing calm-eyed like a saint in hell and watching me above the edge of the shield which such a saint might bear to turn aside the fiery darts of the wicked. And lastly we three men flattened terror-stricken, against the wall.

Nightmare! Imagination! No, these pale before that scene which it was given to our human eyes to witness.

And all the while, bending, bowing towards us — away from us — making obeisance to the path in front as though in greeting, to the path behind as though in farewell; instinct with a horrible life, with a hideous and gigantic grace, that titanic Terror whirled onwards to the mark of fate.