y
wall and cornice and roof.

"Quartz?" marveled Sykes after one long drawn breath. "Quartz or
glass?--what are they made of? It is fairyland!"

A jewelled city! Garish, it might have been, and tawdry, in the full
light of the sun. But on these weirdly unreal structures the sun's rays
never shone; they were illumined only by the soft golden glow that
diffused across this world from the cloud masses far above.

McGuire looked up at that uniform, glowing, golden mass that paled
toward the horizon and faded to the gray of banked clouds. His eyes came
slowly back to the ramp that led downward to the checkered black and
white of the court. Beyond an open portion the pavement was solidly
massed with people.

"People!--we might as well call them that," McGuire had told Sykes;
"they are people of a sort, I suppose. We'll have to give them credit
for brains: they've beaten us a hundred years in their inventions."

He was trying to see everything, understand everything, at once. There
was not time to single out the new impressions that were crowding upon
him. The air--it was warm to the point of discomfort; it explained the
loose, light garments of the people; it came to the two men laden with
strange scents and stranger sounds.

McGuire's eyes held with hungry curiosity upon the dwellers in this
other world; he stared at the gaping throng from which came a bedlam of
shrill cries. Lean colorless hands gesticulated wildly and pointed with
long fingers at the two men.

* * * * *

The din ceased abruptly at a sharp, whistled order from their captor. He
stood aside with a guard that had followed from the ship, and he
motioned the two before him down the gangway. It was the same scarlet
one who had faced them before, the one whom McGuire had attacked in a
frenzy of furious fighting, only to go down to blackness and defeat
before the slim cylinder of steel and its hissing gas. And the slanting
eyes stared wickedly in cold triumph as he ordered them to go before
him in his march of victory.

McGuire passed down toward the masses of color that were the ones who
waited. There were many in the dull red of the ship's crew; others in
sky-blue, in gold and pink and combinations of brilliance that blended
their loose garments to kaleidoscopic hues. But the figures were similar
in one unvarying respect: they were repulsive and ghastly, and their
faces showed bright blotches of blood vessels and blue mar