of lights I could now see down
the rocky defile ahead of me. There was nothing but broken, precipitous
rocky country ahead of him, into which this path he had taken was
winding. What could Perona, a Minister, be engaged in, wandering off
alone into this black, deserted region?

It was black indeed, by now. The village was soon far behind us. A storm
was in the night air; a wind off the sea; solid black clouds overhead
blotted out the moon and stars. The crags and buttes and gullies of this
tumbled area loomed barely visible about me. There were times when only
my feel of the path under my feet kept me from straying, to fall into a
ravine or crevice.

I prowled perhaps two hundred yards behind Perona. He was using a tiny
hand-flash now; it bobbed and winked in the darkness ahead, vanishing
sometimes when a curve in the path hid him, or when he plunged down into
a gully and up again. I had no search-beam. Nor would I have dared use
one: Perona could too obviously have seen that someone was following
him.

There was half a mile of this, I think, though it seemed interminable. I
could hear the sea, rising with the wind, pounding against the rocks to
my left. Then, a distance ahead, I saw lights moving. Perona's--and
others. Three or four of them. Their combined glow made a radiance which
illumined the path and rocks. I could see the figures of several men
whom Perona had joined. They stood a moment and then moved off. To the
right a ragged cliff wall towered the path. The spots of light bobbed
toward it. I caught the vague outline of a huge broken opening, like a
cave mouth in the cliff. The lights were swallowed by it.

I crept cautiously forward.

CHAPTER VI

_Ether-wave Eavesdropping_

I had thought it was a cavern mouth into which the men had disappeared,
but it was not. I reached it without any encounter. It loomed above me,
a great archway in the cliff--an opening fifty feet high and equally as
broad. And behind it was a roofless cave--a sort of irregularly circular
bowl, five hundred feet across its broken, bowlder-strewn, caked-ooze
floor.

I crouched in the blackness under the archway. The moon had risen and
its light filtered with occasional shafts through the swift-flying black
clouds overhead. The scene was brighter. It was dark in the archway, but
a glow of moonlight in the bowl beyond showed me its tumbled floor and
the precipitous, eroded walls, like a crater-rim, which encircled it.

The