terious and terrible, grotesque and savage though she is in many of
her aspects, I can not but love her. Her very savagery appealed to me,
for it is the savagery of unspoiled Nature.

The magnificence of her tropic beauties enthralled me. Her mighty land
areas breathed unfettered freedom.

Her untracked oceans, whispering of virgin wonders unsullied by the eye
of man, beckoned me out upon their restless bosoms.

Not for an instant did I regret the world of my nativity. I was in
Pellucidar. I was home. And I was content.

As I stood dreaming beside the giant thing that had brought me safely
through the earth's crust, my traveling companion, the hideous Mahar,
emerged from the interior of the prospector and stood beside me. For a
long time she remained motionless.

What thoughts were passing through the convolutions of her reptilian
brain?

I do not know.

She was a member of the dominant race of Pellucidar. By a strange
freak of evolution her kind had first developed the power of reason in
that world of anomalies.

To her, creatures such as I were of a lower order. As Perry had
discovered among the writings of her kind in the buried city of Phutra,
it was still an open question among the Mahars as to whether man
possessed means of intelligent communication or the power of reason.

Her kind believed that in the center of all-pervading solidity there
was a single, vast, spherical cavity, which was Pellucidar. This
cavity had been left there for the sole purpose of providing a place
for the creation and propagation of the Mahar race. Everything within
it had been put there for the uses of the Mahar.

I wondered what this particular Mahar might think now. I found
pleasure in speculating upon just what the effect had been upon her of
passing through the earth's crust, and coming out into a world that one
of even less intelligence than the great Mahars could easily see was a
different world from her own Pellucidar.

What had she thought of the outer world's tiny sun?

What had been the effect upon her of the moon and myriad stars of the
clear African nights?

How had she explained them?

With what sensations of awe must she first have watched the sun moving
slowly across the heavens to disappear at last beneath the western
horizon, leaving in his wake that which the Mahar had never before
witnessed--the darkness of night? For upon Pellucidar there is no
night. The stationary sun hangs forever in th