peed. My heart leaped when, for an instant, I
thought something had gone wrong. Then the forward end of the platform
tilted abruptly upward; there was a sudden, momentary fluttering of wings,
a scrambling as the girls' feet touched the ground, and we settled back
and came to rest with hardly more than a slight jar.

Miela stood up, rubbing her arms, which must have ached from her efforts.

"We are here, Alan--safely, as we planned."

We had landed on a little rocky niche that seemed to be in front of the
opening of a small cave mouth in the precipitous cliffside. I stood up
unsteadily, for I was cramped and stiff, and the solid earth seemed
swaying beneath me. I was standing on what was hardly more that a narrow
shelf, not over fifteen feet wide and some thirty feet above the base of
the cliff.

Mercer was beside me, looking about him with obvious awe.

"What a place!" he ejaculated.

We stepped cautiously to the brink of the ledge and peered over.
Underneath us, with the vertical wall of the cliff running directly down
into it, spread a small pool of some heavy, viscous fluid, inky black, and
with iridescent colors floating upon its surface. It bubbled and boiled
lazily, and we could feel its heat on our faces plainly.

Beyond the pool, not more than a hundred yards across, lay a mass of
ragged bowlders piled together in inextricable confusion; beyond these a
chasm with steam rising from it, whose bottom I could not see--a crack as
though the ground had suddenly cooled and split apart. Across the entire
surface of this little cliff-bound circular valley it was the same, as
though here a tortured nature had undergone some terrible agony in the
birth of this world.

The scene, which indeed had something infernal about it, would have been
extraordinary enough by itself; but what made it even more so was the fact
that several hundred girls were perched among these crags, sitting idle,
or standing up and flapping their wings like giant birds, and more were
momentarily swooping in from above. I had, for an instant, the feeling
that I was Dante, surveying the lower regions, and that here was a host of
angels from heaven invading them.

During the next hour fully a thousand girls arrived. There were perhaps
fifteen hundred altogether, and only a few stragglers were hastily flying
in when we decided to wait no longer.

Miela flew out around the little valley, calling them to come closer. They
came flying toward us an