and
an illogical and incomprehensible hope came to him. There was no hope,
of course. He had had, more than once, a despairing conviction that
the utmost result of all his efforts would be but the delaying of
their final enslavement to The Master, whose apparent impersonality
made him the more terrible as he remained mysterious. So far they
seemed like struggling flies in some colossal web, freeing themselves
from one snaring spot to blunder helplessly into another.

But the moon came up presently, rounded and nearly full. The sky took
on a new radiance, and the jungle below them was made darker and more
horrible by the contrast.

And when there were broad stretches of moonlit foliage visible on the
rising slopes beneath, Bell felt the engine faltering. He switched on
the instrument board light. One glance, and he was cold all over. The
motor was hot. Hotter than it had ever been. The oil lines, perhaps
the pump itself....

* * * * *

Paula's hand reached back into the glow of the instrument board. He
leaned over and saw her pointing. Moonlight on rolling water, far
below. He dived for it, steeply. The wing-lights went on. Faint disks
of light appeared far below, sweeping to and fro with the swaying of
the plane, bobbing back and forth.

It seemed to Bell that there had been nothing quite as horrible as
the next minute or two. He felt the over-heated, maltreated motor
laboring. It was being ruined, of course--and a ruined motor meant
that they were marooned in the jungle. But if it kept going only until
they landed. And if it did not....

White water showed below in the disks of the landing lights' glow. It
tumbled down a swift and deadly _raudal_--a rapid. And then--black,
deep water, moving swiftly between tall cliffs of trees.

Bell risked everything to bank about and land toward the white water.
The little plane seemed to be sinking into a canyon as the trees rose
overhead on either side. But the moonlit rapid gave him his height,
approximately, and the lights helped more than a little.

* * * * *

He landed with a terrific crash. The plane teetered on the very verge
of a dive beneath the surface. Bell jerked back the stick and killed
the engine, and it settled back.

A vast, a colossal silence succeeded the deafening noise of twelve
cylinders exploding continuously. There were little hissing sounds as
the motor cooled. There was the smell o