ing sensuously in the deep grass.

* * * * *

When I came to the crest and looked over, I saw another valley before
me, deeper than the first. The hill rolled away, down and down for
miles, to a long, wide plain. More hills rose from the plain on every
side, as simply as if they had been built there by the hand of some
gigantic child playing in a wilderness of sand. And the river, coming
around the base of the hill on which I was standing, but several miles
away, swept out upon a great aqueduct of stone, hundreds of feet high,
which crossed the plain through its very center, a straight line of
breath-taking beauty, and disappeared far away into the pass between two
mountains. The whole scene was too perfect to be wholly natural.

At the center of the plain stood a tall, white building. Even in the
distance from which I viewed it, it looked massive--larger than any
skyscraper I had ever seen. But it was delicately and intricately
designed, terraced much as most modern office buildings in New York are
terraced, but more elaborately. Its base stood about the aqueduct, which
passed through it, and it swept up magnificently to a slender peak
almost level with the crest of the hill where I was standing. It was the
only building in sight.

I don't know how long I stood there, admiring the clean sweep and
vastness of the scene, before I saw something rise sharply, with a
flashing of bright wings, from some hidden courtyard or terrace of the
building. It was followed closely by another and then another, like a
flight of birds. They shot up swiftly, circled once or twice, and moved
away in different directions, straight and purposeful. One of them came
toward my hill.

* * * * *

It was only a few moments before the thing sped up to me and swooped
down as I waved my arms. It was, of course, a machine, slender and long,
with wide arching wings. It seemed almost light enough to float. It had
a deck, shielded from the wind by a shimmering transparent thing like a
thin wire screen, and under the deck a cabin made, it seemed, of glass.
A man and a woman stood on the deck, the woman handling the controls.
They were both dressed much like myself.

The machine came to rest on the hill near me. I stepped forward, and the
man leaped down to meet me. His first greeting was curious.

"So you _are_ here," he said. His voice was small but cool, penetrating
and metallic. I t