ely.

Babs huddled with white horrified face, staring. Then I went out after
Polter. My disappearing legs were great dark blurs in the sky. Alan saw
the valley now contracted to a thousand feet of width, with its cliffs
equally as high. Then everything was smaller.... The sky overhead went
dark again from cliff to cliff as a segment of rolling bodies
momentarily spanned the opening.

Presently Alan realized that the valley had narrowed to a pit. He stood
up. "Hurry! Now we can go after them. Up there!"

The opening above was empty. Polter and I were fighting some distance
away....

Dr. Kent was soon large enough to scramble out of the pit. Alan handed
the little Babs up to him and followed. Alan saw that they were now in a
long gully, blind at one end with a five hundred foot perpendicular
cliff. Against the wall, the Titanic form of Polter stood at bay. And I
was confronting him. The summit of the cliff was lower than our waists.
Triumph swept Alan; he saw that I was the larger! As Polter bored into
me my backward step crossed the full width of the gully. Alan shouted:

"Down! Babs--Father!"

They had barely time to flatten themselves in a narrow crevice between
upstanding rocks before my foot crashed down. For an instant the sole of
my foot formed a flat black ceiling as it spanned the rocks. Then it
lifted and was gone with a blurred swoop. They saw the white blur of my
hand come down and snatch a tremendous boulder, raising it with a great
sweep of movement into the sky. They saw me crash it against Polter; but
it only struck his shoulder. He roared with anger. The whole sky was
roaring and rumbling with our shouts and our panting breathing, and the
ground was clattering, pounding with our giant tread. Huge loose
boulders were tumbled in an avalanche everywhere.

Again it seemed to Alan that our lurching, heedlessly surging bodies
must be crushed within these contracting walls. Only our locked,
intertwined legs were visible; our bodies were lost in the sky. Then it
seemed to Alan that I had heaved Polter upward. And followed him. We
disappeared. There was a distant overhead rumble, and the murky sky,
with vague patches of far-distant illumination in it, became empty of
movement....

The walls presently were again closing upon Alan and his companions.
They ran out of the open end of the shrinking little gully and came to a
new upward vista....

* * * * *

I found myself a f