he shaking death would have been for us!

CHAPTER XXVIII

In the Lair of the Dweller

It is with marked hesitation that I begin this chapter, because in it
I must deal with an experience so contrary to every known law of
physics as to seem impossible. Until this time, barring, of course,
the mystery of the Dweller, I had encountered nothing that was not
susceptible of naturalistic explanation; nothing, in a word, outside
the domain of science itself; nothing that I would have felt hesitancy
in reciting to my colleagues of the International Association of
Science. Amazing, unfamiliar--_advanced_--as many of the phenomena were,
still they lay well within the limits of what we have mapped as the
possible; in regions, it is true, still virgin to the mind of man, but
toward which that mind is steadily advancing.

But this--well, I confess that I have a theory that is naturalistic;
but so abstruse, so difficult to make clear within the short confines
of the space I have to give it, so dependent upon conceptions that
even the highest-trained scientific brains find difficult to grasp,
that I despair.

I can only say that the thing occurred; that it took place in
precisely the manner I am about to narrate, and that I experienced it.

Yet, in justice to myself, I must open up some paths of preliminary
approach toward the heart of the perplexity. And the first path is the
realization that our world _whatever_ it is, is certainly _not_ the
world as we see it! Regarding this I shall refer to a discourse upon
"Gravitation and the Principle of Relativity," by the distinguished
English physicist, Dr. A. S. Eddington, which I had the pleasure of
hearing him deliver before the Royal Institution.[1]

I realize, of course, that it is not true logic to argue--"The world
is not as we think it is--therefore everything we think impossible is
possible in it." Even if it _be_ different, it is governed by _law_. The
truly impossible is that which is outside law, and as nothing _can_ be
outside law, the impossible _cannot_ exist.

The crux of the matter then becomes our determination whether what we
think is impossible may or may not be possible under laws still beyond
our knowledge.

I hope that you will pardon me for this somewhat academic digression,
but I felt it was necessary, and it has, at least, put me more at
ease. And now to resume.

We had watched, Larry and I, the frog-men throw the bodies of Yolara's
assassins into th