ws and mirroring in an infinitely faceted glass the sunlight, it
changed so constantly it was impossible to grasp even a fraction of its
mutations. But Slafe evidently did not share my blessed relief, for he
turned his camera back to catch every last glimpse of the solid green I
was so happy to leave behind.

At the airport, on the way to the boat, on the little vessel itself, I
expected Slafe to relax, to indulge in a conversational word, to do
something to mark him as more than an automaton. But his actions were
confined to using the nasalsyringe, to exchanging one camera for
another, to quizzing the sun through that absurd lorgnette, and to
muttering over cans of film which he sorted and resorted, always to his
inevitable discontent.

While we waited to start, a perverse fog rolled between us and the
mainland. It made a dramatic curtain over the object of our visit and
emphasized the normality and untouchedness of Avalon behind us. As the
boat got under way, strain my eyes as I could eastward, not the faintest
suggestion of the ominous outline showed. We sped toward it, cutting the
purple sea into white foam. Slafe was in the bow, customarily taciturn,
the crew were busy. Alone on board I had no immediate occupation and so
I took out my copy of the _Intelligencer_ and after reading the column
which went under my name and noting the incredible bad taste which had
diluted when it had not excluded everything I had written, I turned as
for consolation to the marketquotations. The Dow-Jones average was down
again, as might be expected since the spread of the weed had unsettled
the delicate balance of the stockmarket. My eyes automatically ran down
the column and over to the corner where stocks were quoted in cents to
reassure my faith in Consolidated Pemmican and Allied Concentrates.
There it was, immovable through any storm or stress or injudicious
investment by Albert Weener, "CP&AC ... 1/16."

I must have raised my eyes from the newspaper just about the time the
fog lifted. Before us, like the smokewreath accompanying the discharge
of some giant cannon, the green mass volleyed into the sea. It did not
slope gently like a beach or offer a rugged shoulder to be gnawed away
as a rocky cliff, but thundered forward into the surging brine, yielding
but invincible, a landforce potent as the wave itself. Hundreds of feet
into the air it towered, falling abruptly in a sharp wall, its ends and
fringes merging with the surf and