race is planning to
emerge again upon earth's surface!"

"And is sending out your Dweller as a messenger, a scientific dove
from their Ark?" I chose to overlook the banter in his question.

"Did you ever hear of the Chamats?" I asked him. He shook his head.

"In Papua," I explained, "there is a wide-spread and immeasurably old
tradition that 'imprisoned under the hills' is a race of giants who
once ruled this region 'when it stretched from sun to sun before the
moon god drew the waters over it'--I quote from the legend. Not only
in Papua but throughout Malaysia you find this story. And, so the
tradition runs, these people--the Chamats--will one day break through
the hills and rule the world; 'make over the world' is the literal
translation of the constant phrase in the tale. It was Herbert Spencer
who pointed out that there is a basis of fact in every myth and legend
of man. It is possible that these survivors I am discussing form
Spencer's fact basis for the Malaysian legend.[1]

"This much is sure--the moon door, which is clearly operated by the
action of moon rays upon some unknown element or combination and the
crystals through which the moon rays pour down upon the pool their
prismatic columns, are humanly made mechanisms. So long as they are
humanly made, and so long as it _is_ this flood of moonlight from which
the Dweller draws its power of materialization, the Dweller itself, if
not the product of the human mind, is at least dependent upon the
product of the human mind for its appearance."

"Wait a minute, Goodwin," interrupted O'Keefe. "Do you mean to say
you think that this thing is made of--well--of moonshine?"

"Moonlight," I replied, "is, of course, reflected sunlight. But the
rays which pass back to earth after their impact on the moon's surface
are profoundly changed. The spectroscope shows that they lose
practically all the slower vibrations we call red and infra-red, while
the extremely rapid vibrations we call the violet and ultra-violet are
accelerated and altered. Many scientists hold that there is an unknown
element in the moon--perhaps that which makes the gigantic luminous
trails that radiate in all directions from the lunar crater
Tycho--whose energies are absorbed by and carried on the moon rays.

"At any rate, whether by the loss of the vibrations of the red or by
the addition of this mysterious force, the light of the moon becomes
something entirely different from mere modified sunli