nts, yet harder to bear, when the immensity
of of the desert earth seemed about to swallow him up in his
loneliness--he had grasped at that vision now soon to be real: he,
Dworn, stood before the assembled horde, the year of his proving
triumphantly completed, and he received before them all the proud,
laconic commendation of the chief, his father.

Hungrily he scanned the horizon ahead, saw with leaping heart that it
was no longer flat. Along it a black line rose, and grew ragged as it
came nearer, and became an endless line of cliffs, marching straight
north and south as far as the eye could see.... The Barrier!

Dworn recognized familiar landmarks, and altered his direction a little
so as to be heading directly for the year's-end rendezvous. He knew,
from childhood memories even, the outline of that vast stone rampart as
it appeared by moonlight. Every year the Barrier formed the eastern
limit of the beetles' annual migration, as naturally as the shore of the
sea was its westward terminus. So it had been for a thousand years or
more, as far back as the oldest traditions reached: generation after
generation, hunting, foraging, and fighting--from the Barrier to the
ocean, from the ocean to the Barrier.

* * * * *

To right and left the serried cliffs stretched out of sight--the edge of
the world, so far as beetles knew. If you examined the contour of its
rim, you could see how it corresponded point by point to the
irregularities of the hilly land on its hither side. Some time,
millennia ago, a great fault in the earth's crust had given way, and the
unknown lands of the continental interior had been lifted as if on a
platform, five hundred feet above the coastal regions. Or perhaps the
coast had sunk. Legend attributed the event to the ancients' wars, when,
it was said, some unimaginable weapon had cleft the continent
asunder....

Dworn perforce slowed his breakneck pace as the ground grew uneven
again. He guided his machine with instinctive skill over the ascending
slopes and ridges, eyes combing the moon-shadows for the first sign of
his people.

Then, a couple of miles ahead, he glimpsed lights. His heart bounded
up--then sank with a prescient dismay; there was something wrong--

The fires that winked up there--four, no, five of them, under the very
rim just before the cliffs rose sheer--didn't look like campfires. They
were unequally spaced, and they flared up and waned oddly b