their concealment, my eyes verified my hopes. There they
were, every man-jack of them; and with them were a thousand straight,
sleek warriors of the Galu race; and ahead of the others came two men
in the garb of Galus. Each was tall and straight and wonderfully
muscled; yet they differed as Ace might differ from a perfect specimen
of another species. As they approached the mire, Ajor held forth her
arms and cried, "Jor, my chief! My father!" and the elder of the two
rushed in knee-deep to rescue her, and then the other came close and
looked into my face, and his eyes went wide, and mine too, and I cried:
"Bowen! For heaven's sake, Bowen Tyler!"

It was he. My search was ended. Around me were all my company and the
man we had searched a new world to find. They cut saplings from the
forest and laid a road into the swamp before they could get us all out,
and then we marched back to the city of Jor the Galu chief, and there
was great rejoicing when Ajor came home again mounted upon the glossy
back of the stallion Ace.

Tyler and Hollis and Short and all the rest of us Americans nearly
worked our jaws loose on the march back to the village, and for days
afterward we kept it up. They told me how they had crossed the barrier
cliffs in five days, working twenty-four hours a day in three
eight-hour shifts with two reliefs to each shift alternating
half-hourly. Two men with electric drills driven from the dynamos
aboard the Toreador drilled two holes four feet apart in the face of
the cliff and in the same horizontal planes. The holes slanted
slightly downward. Into these holes the iron rods brought as a part of
our equipment and for just this purpose were inserted, extending about
a foot beyond the face of the rock, across these two rods a plank was
laid, and then the next shift, mounting to the new level, bored two
more holes five feet above the new platform, and so on.

During the nights the searchlights from the Toreador were kept playing
upon the cliff at the point where the drills were working, and at the
rate of ten feet an hour the summit was reached upon the fifth day.
Ropes were lowered, blocks lashed to trees at the top, and crude
elevators rigged, so that by the night of the fifth day the entire
party, with the exception of the few men needed to man the Toreador,
were within Caspak with an abundance of arms, ammunition and equipment.

From then on, they fought their way north in search of me, after a vai