and. Dimly he knew he no longer held Vilma; dimly he
visioned her as were those ghastly undead; then his body scraped on
something hard, and a blackness that was not physical blotted out
consciousness.

_2. The Dreadful Isle_

Red-hot hammers pounding against his temples wakened Cliff Darrell. He
opened his eyes to stare into total darkness crawling with mental
monsters spawned by his pain-stabbed brain. He lay half immersed in
shallow brine, his head resting on a jagged stone just above the
surface. Struggling to his hands and knees, he shook his head from
side to side, dumbly, like an animal in pain. Something had hit
him--and now he was in water--and there was no light. What had
happened? Where was Vilma?

Vilma! He groaned. He remembered now. They had dropped--and his head
had struck something--and--and--maybe she was floating out there even
now, dead eyes staring upward.

"Vilma!" he cried, his voice pleading. "Vilma!"

Only a mocking echo answered him. There was no other sound, not even
the whisper of waves swishing among the rocks.

Cliff pressed his hands fiercely against his throbbing head. The pain
had become a madness, matched only by the agony of his own
helplessness. He felt his reason reeling; he fought an insane desire
to fling himself shrieking into that silent expanse of water to search
for Vilma; then with a tremendous physical effort he jarred himself
back to sanity.

He staggered to his feet, groped stumblingly over the rocks away from
the water. His hand touched a rock wall broken and pitted by the
action of the sea; and he crept slowly inland, feeling his way like a
blind man. As he plodded on his thoughts blended into one fixed idea:
he must get to light, must get light to search for Vilma.

Gradually the insensate pounding in his head abated, and strength
returned to his body. When at last he saw light beyond a narrow
fissure around an angle in the cavern, he had almost recovered. In
moments he was gazing out over a plain bathed in the glow of a leprous
moon. As he stared, he shivered; and it was not because of the cold
draft drawing through the fissure, fanning his brine-drenched body.

Grim and starkly forbidding the plain lay before him, dead as the
frozen landscape of the moon. Once there had been life there, but now
only the skeletons of trees remained, lifting their wasted limbs in
rigid pleading to an unresponsive sky. Some, there were, that had
fallen, uprooted by the fury o