They both groped their way towards the edge, and had just reached it and were pulling themselves out when a hideous shape rose out of the water behind them. It was like the head of an octopus joined to the body of a boa-constrictor, but head and neck were both of the same ghastly, livid grey as the other two creatures. It was evidently blind, too, for it took no notice of the brilliant glare of the searchlight, but it moved rapidly towards the two scrambling forms, its long white feelers trembling out in all directions. Then one of them touched the smaller of the two shapes. Instantly the rest shot out and closed round it, and with scarcely a struggle it was dragged beneath the water and vanished. [Illustration: _A hideous shape rose out of the water behind them._] Zaidie uttered a little low scream and covered her face again, and Redgrave said: "The same old brutal law you see, life preying upon life even on a dying world, a world that is more than half dead itself. Well, I think we've seen enough of this place. I suppose those are about the only types of life we should meet anywhere, and I don't want to know much more about them. I vote we go and see what the invisible hemisphere is like." "I have had all I want of this side," said Zaidie, looking away from the scene of the hideous tragedy, "so the sooner we go, the better I shall like it." A few minutes later the _Astronef_ was again rising towards the stars with her searchlights still flashing down into the Valley of Expiring Life, which had seemed to them even worse than the Valley of Death. As he followed the rays with a pair of powerful field glasses, Redgrave fancied that he saw huge, dim shapes moving about the stunted shrubbery and through the slimy pools of the stagnant rivers, and once or twice he got a glimpse of what might well have been the ruins of towns and cities, but the gloom soon became too deep and dense for the searchlights to pierce and he was glad when the _Astronef_ soared up into the brilliant sunlight once more. Even the ghastly wilderness of the lunar landscape was welcome after the nameless horrors of that hideous abyss. After a couple of hours' rapid travelling, Redgrave pointed down to a comparatively small, deep crater, and said: "There, that is Malapert. It is almost exactly at the south pole of the moon, and there," he went on, pointing ahead, "is the horizon of the hemisphere which no earthborn eyes have ever seen." "Except ours," said Zaidie somewhat inconsequently, "and I wonder what _we_ shall see." "Probably something very like what we have seen on this side," replied Redgrave, and as the event proved, he was right.