y together. But if not--if we're
separated--if they take you away--"

And the girl nodded quick agreement with his unspoken words.

* * * * *

Chet set his teeth together to make more bearable the pain of those
gripping claws; but the hurt was easier to bear when he saw that the
girl was more carefully treated. She was close ahead as his captors
hustled him from this room into others and yet others, all carved from
the solid rock.

What a people this must be who could do such work as this! Again the
sense of amazement struck through to Chet despite the pain--amazement
and a feeling of an inexplicable incongruity when he saw the
leather-winged creatures that had him in their grip. And again there
were figures high overhead--white, floating figures on pinions of pure
white; their faces, kindly and serene, looked down upon the motley
throng.

"Look above you!" gasped Chet. "Anita! What are they? Not like these
devils!"

And the girl ahead half-turned her head to answer: "Ancestors! A
thousand generations back! They have come down to this state
now--degenerated."

Chet saw one of the beasts who held her jerk her sharply about, and he
knew that his remaining questions must wait--wait forever, perhaps, and
remain unsaid.

They came at last to a place where Chet found the answer to one question
he had not dared ask; a place where gaping chasms in the floor glowed
red with the wrath of unquenched fires. And the girl, Anita, when they
had been placed by themselves against a glowing, lighted wall of rock,
stared steadily at those pits and the sulphurous fumes that vomited out
at times; then turned and spoke to the pilot in a voice steady and sure.

"It will be over quickly," she assured him. "Frithjof said that the
heat, like the warmth of this whole inner world, comes from the
contraction of the rocks in the cold of night. There is great pressure
developed ... but he never learned the source of the light in the
walls."

* * * * *

Talking to still the beating of a heart pulsing with dread, perhaps!
Chet had no mind for explanations. Before him were a score of yawning
clefts in a rocky floor; one was larger than the rest; there were
figures whose white bodies glowed red in its reflected light as they
floated on black wings high above; the light of those hidden fires
blazed and died intermittently. There death was waiting, while these
demons--these degen