t ten. I thought he'd turn them all on when he got into
the hole, but he didn't. Either they were damaged in the fall, or
Quade doesn't see fit to use them."

"Half of them are enough," said Phil bitterly, and put his arm around
the quiet girl standing next to him. Together, a silent little group,
they watched the spot of orange die to a pin-point; watched it waver,
twinkle, ever growing smaller.... And then it was gone.

Gone! Back to the surface of the earth, to the normal world of
reality. Only four miles above them--a small enough distance on the
surface itself--and yet it might have been a million miles, so utterly
were they barred from it....

* * * * *

The same thought was in their minds, though none of them dared express
it. They were thinking of the serene desert, and the cool wind, and
the buttes and the high hills, placid in the moonlight. Of the hushed
rise of the dawn, the first flush of the sun that was so achingly
lovely on the desert. The sun they would never see again, buried in a
lifeless world of gloom four miles within.... And buried alive--and
not alive for long....

But that way lay madness. Phil Holmes drove the horrible thoughts from
his brain and forced a smile to his face.

"Well, that's that!" he said in a voice meant to be cheerful.

The dim cavern echoed his words mockingly. With the earth-borer
gone--the man-made machine that had dared break a solitude undisturbed
since the earth first cooled--the great cavern seemed to return to its
awful original mood. The three dwarfed humans became wholly conscious
of it. They felt it almost a living thing, stretching vastly around
them, tightening its unheard spell on them. Its smell, of mouldy earth
and rocks down which water slowly dripped, filled their nostrils and
somehow added to their fear.

As they looked about, their eyes became accustomed to the dim, eery,
phosphorescent illumination. They saw little worm-like creatures now
and again appear from tiny holes between stalagmites in the jagged
floor; and, as Phil wondered in his mind how long it would be before
they would be reduced to using them for food, a strange mole-sized
animal scraped from the darkness and pecked at one of them. As it
slithered away, a writhing shape in its mouth, Holmes muttered
bitterly: "A competitor!" Vague, flitting forms haunted the gloom
among the stalactites of the distorted ceiling--hints of the things
that lived in the ter