* *

"You will remember," he said to Gor. His voice sounded dull and heavy;
it hardly seemed himself who was speaking. "You know the day and the
hour. This is the nineteenth. It is now noon--twelve o'clock in my
world. When the Voice of the Mountain says that noon again has come
you will do as I said."

"The Mountain speaks without ceasing now," said Gor, "telling always
of what the Red Ones do. We will count the hours as they pass. In
twenty-four of those hours Gor will descend in the _jana_ of the Reds
to do as Dean Rah-Sun has commanded."

Rawson held out his hand. He was suddenly wordless. Then Loah threw
herself into Gor's arms in one last passionate embrace--but it was she
who entered the _jana_ first.

"Come," she said to Dean. "Oh, come quickly, Dean-San!" Then he, too
stepped inside and made the heavy door fast.

Men of the White Ones had been holding the big cylinder down. But
Rawson, staring through the window, saw that it was Gor's own hands
that swung them out at last above the pit.

Their craft hung quivering for an instant in the rushing air; then
Loah moved one of the levers a trifle and the blackness took them, and
only the little bull's-eyes in the metal ceiling showed the fading
glow of the Inner World, the home of the People of the Light, which
their eyes never again would see.

CHAPTER XXIV

_The Bargain_

Rawson had taken one flame-thrower with him. He tied it securely
inside the shell so it could not shift with the changing gravity, or
be accidentally turned on. Again he clung to the curved bar against
the wall. Loah stood at the center, directing the craft.

Once again he floated in air, then found himself standing on what had
been the ceiling of the room. The girl had released a considerable
quantity of the lifting element in the _jana's_ end, and now the black
powder in the other end of the central tube was dragging them at
terrific speed as it rushed away from the earth's center.

Over six hundred miles, Rawson had figured, from that inner surface to
the neutral zone where the red substance of the earth, that was
neither rock nor metal, under terrific pressures, glowed with fervent
heat or formed pools like the Lake of Fire.

Perhaps a hundred miles thick, that zone of incessant energy, and
their little craft tore through it at tremendous speed. Even so, he
was gasping for breath in the heated room when the glow faded and
again he swung over and down upon t