urished children, naked, or in rags that afforded
little more protection than nakedness, thrust their starved,
red-smeared faces up at him, and gibed and howled.

And above all this arose the white majesty of his palace--the throne of
the Gray Dragon!

Peter urged the mule up the scarlet alley to a clearing in which he
found coolies by the thousands, trudging moodily from a central orifice
that continued to disgorge more and more of them. The dreadful,
reeking creatures blinked and gaped as if stupefied by the rosy light
of the dying day.

Some carried lanterns of modern pattern; others bore picks and shovels
and iron buckets, and they seemed to pass on interminably, to be
engulfed in the lanes which ran in all directions from the clearing.

It was as though the earth were vomiting up the vilest of its
creatures. And in the same light it was consuming others of equal
vileness. Down into the red maws of the shaft an endless chain of men
and women and children were descending.

Quite suddenly the light gave way, and Peter was aware that the night
of the mountains was creeping out over the city, blotting out its
disfigurements, replacing the hideous redness with a velvety black.

At the shaft's entrance a sharp spot of dazzling light sprang into
being. It was an electric arc light! Somehow this apparition struck
through the horror that saturated him, and he sighed as if his mind had
relinquished a clinging nightmare.

Professionally now he gave this section of Len Yang another scrutiny.
Thick cables sagged between stumpy poles like clusters of black snakes,
all converging at the mine's entrance. His acute ears were registering
a dull hum, indicating the imminence of high-geared machinery or of
dynamos.

At the further side of the red shaft, now crusted with the night's
shades, and garishly illuminated by the diamond whiteness of the frosty
arc, he made out a deep, wide ditch, where flowed slowly a ruddy
current, supplied from a short fat pipe.

Peter believed that electric pumps sucked out the red seepage waters
from the mine and lifted them to the bloody ditch.

On impulse he lifted his eyes to the darkening heavens, and he knew now
that the threads of this, his greatest adventure, were being drawn to a
meeting point; for he detected in the sun's last refracted rays the
bronze glint of aerial wires! What lay at the base of the antenna he
could guess accurately. He hastened to the base of the nearest ae