ith a steady
downward slope. And suddenly I realized that we had turned downward
nearly half the diameter of a circle! We had turned over--or at least
it seemed so. But the gravity was the same. I had noticed from the
beginning very little change.

The realization of this turning brought a mental confusion. I lost all
sense of direction. The outer world of Earth was under my feet,
instead of overhead. Then we went level. I forgot the confusion; this
was normality here. We turned upward a little. Cross tunnels
intersected ours at intervals. I saw caverns, open, widened tunnels,
as though this mountain were honeycombed.

"Look!" said Glora. "There is the way out. All these passages lead the
same way."

* * * * *

There was a glow of light ahead. I recall that I was at that moment
fumbling at my belt in two small compartments of which I was carrying
the two vials of the drugs which Glora had given me. Alan wore the
same sort of belt. We had found them in the wrecked dome-room. I heard
a click on the ground at my feet. I was about to stoop to see what I
had kicked--only a loose stone, perhaps--but Glora's words distracted
me. I did not stoop. If only I had, how different events might have
been!

The glow of light ahead of us widened as we approached, and presently
we stood at the end of the tunnel. A spread of open distance was
outside. We were on a ledge of a rocky, precipitous wall some fifty
feet above a wide level landscape. Vegetation! I saw trees--a forest
off to the left. A range of naked hills lay behind it. A mile away, in
front and to the right, a little town nestled on the shore of shining
water. There was starlight on the water! And over it a vast
blue-purple sky was studded with stars!

I gazed, with that first sudden shock of emotion, into illimitable
depths of interplanetary space! Light years of distance. Gigantic
worlds, blazing suns off there shrunken by distance now to little
points of light. A universe was here!

But this was an inch of golden quartz!

Above my head were stars which, compared to my bodily size now, were
vast worlds ten thousand light-years away! Yet, from the other
viewpoint, I had only descended perhaps an eighth or a quarter of an
inch beneath the broken pitted surface of a little fragment of golden
quartz the size of a walnut--into just one of its myriads of golden
atoms!

CHAPTER VI

_The Girl in the Golden Cage_

"My world," Glora wa