golden quartz--if one were large enough to see it that way!

Alan had been trying to memorize the main topographical features of our
route. It was not as difficult as it seemed at first. We were always far
larger than normal in comparison to our environment, and the main
distinguishing characteristics of the landscape were obvious--the blind
gully, with the round pit, for instance, or the ramp slide.

We had been traveling some three or four hours when Glora suggested a
rest. We were at the edge of a broad canyon. The wall towered several
hundred feet above us; but a few moments before, we had jumped down it
with a single leap!

The last pellet we had taken had ceased its action. We sat down to rest.
It was a wild, mountainous scene around us, deep with luminous gloom. We
could barely see across the canyon to its distant cliff wall. The wall
beside us had been smooth, but now it was broken and ridged. There were
ravines in it, and dark holes resembling cave-mouths. One was near us.
Alan gazed at it apprehensively.

"I say, Glora, I don't like sitting here."

I had been telling her all we knew of Polter. She listened quietly,
seldom interrupting me. Then she said:

"I understand. I tell you now about Polter as I have seen him."

She talked for five or ten minutes. I listened, amazed, awed by what she
said.

But Alan's insistence interrupted her. "Come on, let's get out of here.
That tunnel-mouth, or cave, or whatever it is--"

"But we go in there," she protested. "A little tunnel. That is our way
to travel. We are not far from my city now."

Perhaps Alan felt what once was called a hunch, a premonition, the
presage of evil which I think comes strangely to us more often than we
realize. Whatever it was, we had no time to act upon it. The
tunnel-mouth which had caused Alan's apprehension was about a hundred
feet away. It was a ten-foot, yawning hole in the cliff. Perhaps Alan
sensed a movement in there. As I turned to look at it a great, hairy
human arm came out of the opening! Then a shoulder! A head!

The giant figure of a man came squeezing through the hole on his hands
and knees! He gathered himself, and as he stood erect, I saw that he was
growing in size! Already he was twenty feet tall compared to us--a
thick-set fellow, dressed in leather garments, his legs and arms heavily
matted with black hair. He stood swaying, gazing around him. I stared up
at his round bullet head, his villainous face.

He saw u