Sarka felt himself on the eve of vast important discoveries, and the scientist in him made him, for the moment, almost forget the woman at his side. Jaska, unbothered about anything, now that Sarka was at her side, regarded his expression of deep concentration with a tolerant smile. Whiter now was the light, and faster fell the globe which held the two. The color of the globe, now fallen below the area of blue, had taken on, chameleonlike, the color of the white flames that bathed it. Then, apparently right in the center of a lake of white flames, though Sarka could see no solid place on which the globe had landed, the globe came to rest. Now everything was plain to see, and Sarka studied his surroundings with new interest. He felt a mounting sensation of scalp-prickling horror. For, scattered throughout the lake of white flames, in all directions, as far as the eye could reach--standing alone, suffering untold agonies, from the expressions on their faces--were people of the Gens of Dalis! * * * * * No longer were they clothed in green and wearing on breast and back the yellow stars of their Gens. Now they were nude as they had come into the world and standing there, each was holding out hands in horror, to hold back myriads of the Gnomes, who would have forced them to submerge themselves in the white flames of the lake! Was the Gens of Dalis being burned alive? What was the meaning of this? For a moment, filled with horror, Sarka looked away from the spectacle. Off to his right, as he sat, he noted that the flames, which here seemed lighter than they had in high levels, were converging on a single spot toward the side of the lake of white flames--as smoke converges on the base of a chimney leading outward to the air! He knew as he stared that he was gazing at the spot where the bluish column of the cone was born! Shaking his head, he turned back to the mighty spectacle of this horrible thing that was being done to the people of the Gens of Dalis. In his brain there suddenly crashed a thought whose source he could only guess at, whose meaning mystified him more than anything yet experienced. The thought might have emanated from Luar, or from Dalis. But the more he thought of the matter, the more he thought how the phrasing of the thought was like the telepathy of Sarka the Second, now thousands of miles away, upon the Earth. And this was the thought: "If they fight the flames, the flames will destroy them! If they go into them freely, voluntarily, they will be rendered immune to heat and to cold, to life and to death. But it is better that they die, for Earth's sake!" What did it mean? * * * * * Sarka thought of the radiant white light which perpetually bathed the person of Luar, and thought that he had somehow been given a hint of its source. If the Gens of Dalis were voluntarily bathed in the lake of white flames, would they become as Luar?