e Reader was gone. Something had plucked him from their
huddled midst as neatly as a fallen breadfruit--and had dropped his
cleaned ivory skull just as negligently, some two hundred feet farther
on up the slope which led toward the pink cliffs.

* * * * *

Late that afternoon, the three found the blue, turbulent stream flowing
out of the foothills of the Great Range. Not even Alaskon knew quite
what to make of it. It looked like water, but it flowed like the rivers
of lava that crept downward from the volcanoes. Whatever else it could
be, obviously it wasn't water; water stood, it never flowed. It was
possible to imagine a still body of water as big as this, but only in a
moment of fancy, an exaggeration derived from the known bodies of water
in the tank-plants. But this much water in motion? It suggested pythons;
it was probably poisonous. It did not occur to any of them to drink from
it. They were afraid even to touch it, let alone cross it, for it was
almost surely as hot as the other kinds of lava-rivers. They followed
its course cautiously into the foothills, their throats as dry and
gritty as the hollow stems of horsetails.

Except for the thirst--which was in an inverted sense their friend,
insofar as it overrode the hunger--the climbing was not difficult. It
was only circuitous, because of the need to stay under cover, to
reconnoiter every few yards, to choose the most sheltered course rather
than the most direct. By an unspoken consent, none of the three
mentioned Charl, but their eyes were constantly darting from side to
side, searching for a glimpse of the thing that had taken him.

That was perhaps the worst, the most terrifying part of the tragedy: not
once, since they had been in Hell, had they actually seen a demon--or
even any animal as large as a man. The enormous, three-taloned footprint
they had found in the sand beside their previous night's bed--the spot
where the thing had stood, looking down at the four sleepers from above,
coldly deciding which of them to seize--was the only evidence they had
that they were now really in the same world with the demons. The world
of the demons they had sometimes looked down upon from the remote
vine-webs.

The footprint--and the skull.

By nightfall, they had ascended perhaps a hundred and fifty feet. It was
difficult to judge distances in the twilight, and the token vine bridges
from the attic world to the pink cliffs were now