ad found it--and it was nothing. The ship was as far away as ever....

But discouragement was as useless as iron-stained sandstone. He shook it
off and turned to Barber.

"Let's go," he said. "Maybe we'll find something by the time we circle
the chasm."

For seven days they risked the danger of death from downward plunging
rocks and found nothing. On the eighth day they found the treasure that
was not treasure.

They stopped for the evening just within the mouth of one of the chasm's
tributaries. Humbolt went out to get a drink where a trickle of water
ran through the sand and as he knelt down he saw the flash of something
red under him, almost buried in the sand.

He lifted it out. It was a stone half the size of his hand; darkly
translucent and glowing in the light of the setting sun like blood.

It was a ruby.

He looked, and saw another gleam a little farther up the stream. It was
another ruby, almost as large as the first one. Near it was a flawless
blue sapphire. Scattered here and there were smaller rubies and
sapphires, down to the size of grains of sand.

He went farther upstream and saw specimens of still another stone. They
were colorless but burning with internal fires. He rubbed one of them
hard across the ruby he still carried and there was a gritting sound as
it cut a deep scratch in the ruby.

"I'll be damned," he said aloud.

There was only one stone hard enough to cut a ruby--the diamond.

* * * * *

It was almost dark when he returned to where Barber was resting beside
their packs.

"What did you find to keep you out so late?" Barber asked curiously.

He dropped a double handful of rubies, sapphires and diamonds at
Barber's feet.

"Take a look," he said. "On a civilized world what you see there would
buy us a ship without our having to lift a finger. Here they're just
pretty rocks.

"Except the diamonds," he added "At least we now have something to cut
those quartz crystals with."

* * * * *

They took only a few of the rubies and sapphires the next morning but
they gathered more of the diamonds, looking in particular for the
gray-black and ugly but very hard and tough carbonado variety. Then they
resumed their circling of the chasm's walls.

The heat continued its steady increase as the days went by. Only at
night was there any relief from it and the nights were growing swiftly
shorter as the blue sun rose earlier