lightning blazed, and the city howled and screamed and burned.

Then, unbelievably, the thunder fell silent, and the silence swept
outward like a wave, from ruined street to street. The mouths that had
shouted their wrath were speechless, and the rage-blinded eyes were
lifted in sudden awe. From the center, over the citadel, an immense
white globe soared upward, rising swiftly without sound.

They had never seen its like, but they knew. It was the last starship,
and it was leaving.

It poised motionless. For an instant the burning city lay mute; then the
millions found voice. Some roared ferocious threats and curses; others
cried desolately--_wait!_

Then the whole city, the dark tumuli of its buildings and its leaping
fires and tormented faces, and the black sky over it, seemed to twist
and swim, like a scene under water when a great fish sweeps past, and
the ship was gone.

The stunned paralysis fell apart in fury. Flame towered over the
citadel. The hordes ran and shrieked again toward the central inferno,
and the city burned and burned....

* * * * *

Var blinked dazedly in the shadowless glow of the ice-cave. His arm
tightened about Neena till she gasped. He was momentarily uncertain that
he and she were real and here, such had been the force of the dream, a
vision of such scope and reality as Var had never seen--no, lived
through--before. With deep respect now he gazed upon the bent old man
who was the Mountain Watcher.

"Some of the Ryzgas took flight to the stars, and some perished on
Earth. But there was a group of them who believed that their time to
rule would come again. These raised a black mountain from the Earth's
heart, and in hollows within it cast themselves into deathless sleep,
their deathless and lifeless sentinels round them, to wait till someone
dare arouse them, or until their chosen time--no one knows surely.

"I have told you the story you know, and have shown you a glimpse of the
old time, because I must make sure that you do not approach the mountain
in ignorance. Our world is unwise and sometimes evil, full of arrogance,
folly, and passion that are in the nature of man. Yet it is a happy
world, compared to that the Ryzgas made and will make again."

The Watcher eyed them speculatively. "Before all," he said finally,
"this is a world where you are free to risk wakening the old tyrants, if
in your own judgment your great need renders the chance worth