and the clouds lighter. Land and sea were
more sharply divided, and both teeming with life. The seas still swarmed
with serpentine monsters of the saurian type, and the firmer lands were
peopled by huge animals, mastodons, bears, giant tapirs, mylodons,
deinotheriums, and a score of other species too strange for them to
recognise by any Earthly likeness, which roamed in great herds through
the vast twilit forests and over boundless plains covered with grey-blue
vegetation.

Here, too, they found mountains for the first time on Saturn; mountains
steep-sided, and many Earth-miles high.

As the _Astronef_ was skirting the side of one of these ranges Redgrave
allowed it to approach more closely than he had so far done to the
surface of Saturn.

"I shouldn't wonder if we found some of the higher forms of life up
here," he said. "If there is any kind of being that is going to develop
some day into the human race of Saturn it would naturally get up here."

"I should hope so," said Zaidie, "and just as far as possible out of the
reach of those unutterable horrors on the equator. That would be one of
the first signs they would show of superior intelligence. Look! I
believe there are some of them. Do you see those holes in the
mountain-side there? And there they are, something like gorillas, only
twice as big, and up the trees, too--and what trees! They must be seven
or eight hundred feet high."

"Tree-men and cave-dwellers, and ancestors of the future royal race of
Saturn, I suppose!" said Redgrave. "They don't look very nice, do they?
Still, there's no doubt about their being far superior in intelligence
to those other brutes we saw. Evidently this atmosphere is too thin for
the two-headed jelly-fishes and the saurians to breathe. These creatures
have found that out in a few hundreds of generations, and so they have
come to live up here out of the way. Vegetarians, I suppose, or perhaps
they live on smaller monkeys and other animals, just as our ancestors
did."

"Really, Lenox," said Zaidie, turning round and facing him, "I must say
that you have a most unpleasant way of alluding to one's ancestors. They
couldn't help what they were."

"Well, dear," he said, going towards her, "marvellous as the miracle
seems, I'm heretic enough to believe it possible that your ancestors
even, millions of years ago, perhaps, may have been something like
those; but then, of course, you know I'm a hopeless Darwinian."

"And, therefore,