aps of the
inhabitants--had escaped; hourly the search patrols were picking them
up, bringing them to Industriana. Rescue parties were searching the
city, to find any who might still be alive.

And out in the forest lay a great pile of ashes, still exhaling a thin
wisp of its deadly breath--where Tarrano had created the Black Cloud;
lost his captive Elza, but doubtless had escaped himself back to his
City of Ice.

We found Georg and Maida safe at Industriana. Marvelous city! Elza had
never seen it before. She sat gazing breathless as from the air on the
patrol vessel, we approached it.

The land of this region was a black, rocky soil upon which vegetation
would not grow. A rolling land, grimly black, metallic; with
outcroppings of ore, red and white and with occasional patches of thin
white sand whereon a prickly blue grass struggled for life.

Rolling hills; and then places where nature had upheaved into a turmoil.
Huge naked black crags; buttes; hills with precipitous black sides of
sleek metal; narrow canyons with tumultuous water flowing through them.

In such a place stood Industriana. The City of Work! Set in an area
where nature lay scarred, twisted in convulsion, its buildings clung to
every conceivable slope and in every position. Many-storied
buildings--residences and factories indiscriminately intermingled. All
built in sober, solid rectangles of the forbidding black stone.

A long steep slope from an excavated quarry deep in the ground, ran
straight up to a commanding hilltop--the slope set with an orderly array
of buildings clinging to it in terraces. Buildings huge, or tiny huts;
all anchored in the rear to the ground, and set upon metal girders in
the front. Bisecting the slope was a vertical street--a broad escalator
of moving steps, one half going upward, the other down. Beside it, a
series of other escalators for the traffic of moving merchandise.

Cross streets on the hill were spider bridges, clinging with thin, stiff
legs. And at the summit of the hill stood a tremendous funnel belching
flame and smoke into the sky.

To one side of the hill lay a bowl-like depression with a single squat
building in its center--a low building of many funnels; and about it the
black yawning mouths of shafts down into the ground--mines vomiting ore,
broken chunks of the metallic rock coming up as though by the invisible
magic of magnetism, hunting through the air in an arc to fall with a
clatter into great bin