been traveling.

My compass told me I was heading due north.

The fog was a living, sentient thing now, secretive, shrouding the
secret that lay beyond its gray wall.

Suddenly I was conscious of a change. An electric tingle coursed
through my body. Abruptly the fog-wall brightened. Dimly, as through a
translucent pane, I could make out vague images ahead of me.

I began to move toward the images--and suddenly the fog was gone!

Before me lay a valley. Blue-white moss carpeted it except where
reddish boulders broke the blueness. Here and there were trees--at
least I assumed they were trees, despite their unfamiliar outline.
They were like banyans, having dozens of trunks narrow as bamboo.
Blue-leafed, they stood like immense bird-cages on the pallid moss.
The fog closed in behind the valley and above it. It was like being in
a huge sun-lit cavern.

I turned my head, saw a gray wall behind me. Beneath my feet the snow
was melting and running in tiny, trickling rivulets among the moss.
The air was warm and stimulating as wine.

A strange and abrupt change. Impossibly strange! I walked toward one
of the trees, stopped at a reddish boulder to examine it. And surprise
caught at my throat. It was an artifact--a crumbling ruin, the remnant
of an ancient structure whose original appearance I could not fathom.
The stone seemed iron-hard. There were traces of inscription on it,
but eroded to illegibility. And I never did learn the history of those
enigmatic ruins.... They did not originate on Earth.

There was no sign of the native girl, and the resilient moss retained
no tracks. I stood there, staring around, wondering what to do now. I
was tense with excitement. But there was little to see. Just that
valley covering perhaps a half-mile before the fog closed in around
it.

Beyond that--I did not know what lay beyond that.

I went on, into the valley, eyeing my surroundings curiously in the
shadowless light that filtered through the shifting roof of fog.
Foolishly, I expected to discover Incan artifacts. The crumbled red
stones should have warned me. They were, I think, harder than metal,
yet they had been here long enough for the elements to erode them into
featureless shards. Had they been of earthly origin they would have
antedated Mankind--antedated even the Neanderthaler man.

Curious how our minds are conditioned to run in anthropomorphic lines.
I was, though I did not know it, walking through a land that had