lso had with me a great roll of paper which
had been folded in the giant's belt, with the drug cylinder. We unrolled
it, and hauled its folds to a spread some ten feet long. It was covered
with a scrawled handwriting in pencil, but its giant characters seemed
thick blurred strokes of charcoal. We could not read it; we were too
close. Alan and Glora held it up against the tunnel wall. From a
distance I could make it out. It was a note written in English, signed
"Polter," evidently to one of his men.

It read:

_The two prisoners, kill them at once. That is better. It will be too
dangerous to wait for my return. Put their bodies with their airplane.
Crash it a mile from my gate._

Full directions for our death followed. And Polter said he would return
by dawn or soon after.

That gave me a start. By dawn! We had been traveling four or five hours.
It was already dawn up there now!

"No," Glora explained, "the time in here is different. A different
time-rate. I do not know how much difference. My world speeds faster;
yours is very slow. It is not the dawn up there quite yet."

Again my mind strove to encompass these things--so strange. A faster
time-rate prevailed in here? Then our lives were passing more quickly.
We were living, experiencing things, compressed into a shorter interval.
It was not apparent: there was nothing to which comparison could be
made. I recalled Alan's description of Polter--not thirty years old as
he should have been, but nearer fifty. I could understand that, now. A
day in here was equal to only a few hours on our gigantic world outside.

We walked the length of the tunnel. I suppose it was a quarter of a
mile, to us in this size. It wound through the cliff with a steady
downward slope. And suddenly I realized that we had turned downward
nearly half the diameter of a circle! We had turned over--or at least it
seemed so. But the gravity was the same. I had noticed from the
beginning very little change.

The realization of this tunnel brought a mental confusion. I lost all
sense of direction. The outer world of Earth was under my feet, instead
of overhead. Then we went level. I forgot the confusion: this was
normality here. We turned upward a little. Cross tunnels intersected
ours at intervals. I saw caverns, open, widened tunnels, as though this
mountain were honeycombed.

"Look!" said Glora. "There is the way out. All these passages lead the
same way."

There was a glow of light ahead.