miles of barren, naked landscape. I gazed off
to where, across the rugged plateau we were traversing, there was a
range of hills. Behind and above them were mountains; serrated tiers,
higher and more distant. An infinite spread of landscape! And, as we
dwindled, still other vast reaches opened before us. I gazed overhead.
Was it--compared to my stature now--a thousand miles, perhaps even a
million miles up to where we had been two or three hours ago? I think
so.

Then suddenly I caught the other viewpoint. This was all only an inch
of golden quartz--if one were large enough to see it that way!

Alan had been trying to memorize the main topographical features of
our route. It was not as difficult as it seemed at first. We were
always far larger than normal to our environment. The main
distinguishing characteristics of the landscape were obvious--the
blind gully, with the round pit, for instance, or the ramp-slide.

We had been traveling some three or four hours when Glora suggested a
rest. We were at the side-wall of a broad canyon. The wall towered
several hundred feet above us; but a few moments before we had jumped
down it with a single leap!

* * * * *

The drug we had last taken had ceased its action. We sat down to rest.
It was a wild, mountainous scene around us, deep with luminous gloom.
We could barely see across the canyon to its distant cliff-wall. The
wall beside us had been smooth, but now it was broken and ridged.
There were ravines in it, and dark holes like cave-mouths. One was
near us. Alan gazed at it apprehensively.

"I say, Glora. I don't like sitting here."

I had been telling her all we knew of Polter. She listened quietly,
seldom interrupting me. Then she said:

"I understand. I tell you now about Polter as I have seen him."

She talked for five or ten minutes. I listened amazed, awed by what
she told.

But Alan suddenly interrupted her. "I say, let's move away from here.
That tunnel-mouth, or cave, whatever it is--"

"But we go in there," she protested. "A little tunnel. That is our way
to travel. We are not far from my city now."

Perhaps Alan felt what a generation ago they called a hunch, a
premonition, the presage of evil which I think comes strangely to us
more often than we realize. Whatever it was, we had no time to act
upon it. The tunnel-mouth which had caused Alan's apprehension was
about a hundred feet away. It was a ten-foot, black yawning