* * *

McGuire helped the other man to his feet, and they clung to each to
the other for support as they crossed to kneel beside the floor-window
and learn finally where their captors meant to take them.

A wilderness, indeed, the sight that met their eyes, but a wilderness
of clouds--no unfamiliar sight to Lieutenant McGuire of the United
States Army air service. But to settle softly into them instead of
driving through with glistening wings--this was new and vastly
different from anything he had known.

Sounds came to them in the silence, penetrating faintly through thick
walls--the same familiar wailing call that trembled and quavered and
seemed to the listening men to be guiding them down through the mist.

Gone was the sunlight, and the clouds beyond the deep-set window were
gloriously ablaze with a brilliance softly diffused. The cloud bank
was deep, and they felt the craft under them sink slowly, steadily
into the misty embrace. It thinned below them to drifting vapor, and
the first hazy shadows of the ground showed through from far beneath.
Their altitude, the flyer knew, was still many thousands of feet.

"Water," said McGuire, as his trained eyes made plain to him what was
still indistinct to the scientist. "An ocean--and a shore-line--" More
clouds obscured the view; they parted suddenly to show a portion only
of a clear-cut map.

* * * * *

It stretched beyond the confines of their window, that unfamiliar line
of wave-marked shore; the water was like frozen gold, wrinkled in
countless tiny corrugations and reflecting the bright glow from above.
But the land,--that drew their eyes!

Were those cities, those shadow-splashed areas of gray and rose?...
The last veiling clouds dissolved, and the whole circle was plain to
their view.

The men leaned forward, breathless, intent, till the scientist,
Sykes--the man whose eyes had seen and whose brain recorded a dim
shape in the lens of a great telescope--Sykes drew back with a
quivering, incredulous breath. For below them, so plain, so
unmistakable, there lay an island, large even from this height, and it
formed on this round map a sharp angle like a great letter "L."

"We shall know that if we ever see it again," Professor Sykes had
remarked in the quiet and security of that domed building surmounting
the heights of Mount Lawson. But he said nothing now, as he stared at
his companion with eyes that implored McGu