st as trade winds provide moisture in equal quantity on
other worlds, and civilizations have been built upon it. But----

* * * * *

"Well?" said Bordman challengingly.

"This is the site of the landing grid," said Redfeather.

"Where?"

"Here," said the Indian dryly. "A few months ago there was a valley
here. The landing grid had eighteen hundred feet of height built. There
was to be four hundred feet more--the lighter top construction justifies
my figure of eighty per cent completion. Then there was a storm."

[Illustration]

It was hot. Horribly, terribly hot, even here on a plateau at
mountaintop height. Dr. Chuka looked at Bordman's face and bent down in
the vehicle. He turned a stopcock on one of the air tanks brought for
Bordman's necessity. Immediately Bordman felt cooler. His skin was dry,
of course. The circulated air dried sweat as fast as it appeared. But he
had the dazed, feverish feeling of a man in an artificial-fever box.
He'd been fighting it for some time. Now the coolness of the expanded
air was almost deliriously refreshing.

Dr. Chuka produced a canteen. Bordman drank thirstily. The water was
slightly salted to replace salt lost in sweat.

"A storm, eh?" asked Bordman, after a time of contemplation of his inner
sensations as well as the scene of disaster before him. There'd be some
hundreds of millions of tons of sand in even a section of this plateau.
It was unthinkable that it could be removed except by a long-time sweep
of changed trade winds along the length of the valley. "But what has a
storm to do----"

"It was a sandstorm," said Redfeather coldly. "Probably there was a
sunspot flare-up. We don't know. But the pre-colonization survey spoke
of sandstorms. The survey team even made estimates of sandfall in
various places as so many inches per year. Here all storms drop sand
instead of rain. But there must have been a sunspot flare because this
storm blew for"--his voice went flat and deliberate because it was
stating the unbelievable--"for two months. We did not see the sun in all
that time. And we couldn't work, naturally. The sand would flay a man's
skin off his body in minutes. So we waited it out.

"When it ended, there was this sand plateau where the survey had ordered
the landing grid to be built. The grid was under it. It is under it. The
top of eighteen hundred feet of steel is still buried two hundred feet
down in the sand you see. Our unfabr