We took other pellets. We traveled perhaps an hour more. There were many
instances of Glora's skill. We squeezed into a gully and waited until it
widened; we leapt over expanding caverns; we slid down a smooth
yellowish slide of rocks, and saw it behind and over us, rising to
become a great spreading ramp extending upward into the blue of the sky.
Now, up there, little sailing white clouds were visible. And down where
we stood it was deep twilight, queerly silvery with the dim light from
the luminous rocks, as though some hidden moon were shining.
Strange, new world! I suddenly envisaged the full strangeness of it.
Around me were spreading miles of barren, naked landscape. I gazed off
to where, across the rugged plateau we were traversing, there was a
range of hills. Behind and above them were mountains; serrated tiers;
higher and more distant. An infinite spread of landscape! And, as we
dwindled, still other vast reaches opened before us. I gazed overhead.
Was it--compared to my stature now--a thousand miles, perhaps even a
million miles up to where we had been two or three hours ago? I thought
so.
Then suddenly I caught the other viewpoint. This was all only an inch of
golden quartz--if one were large enough to see it that way!
Alan had been trying to memorize the main topographical features of our
route. It was not as difficult as it seemed at first. We were always far
larger than normal in comparison to our environment, and the main
distinguishing characteristics of the landscape were obvious--the blind
gully, with the round pit, for instance, or the ramp slide.
We had been traveling some three or four hours when Glora suggested a
rest. We were at the edge of a broad canyon. The wall towered several
hundred feet above us; but a few moments before, we had jumped down it
with a single leap!
The last pellet we had taken had ceased its action. We sat down to rest.
It was a wild, mountainous scene around us, deep with luminous gloom. We
could barely see across the canyon to its distant cliff wall. The wall
beside us had been smooth, but now it was broken and ridged. There were
ravines in it, and dark holes resembling cave-mouths. One was near us.
Alan gazed at it apprehensively.
"I say, Glora, I don't like sitting here."
I had been telling her all we knew of Polter. She listened quietly,
seldom interrupting me. Then she said:
"I understand. I tell you now about Polter as I have seen him."
She talked for five or ten minutes. I listened, amazed, awed by what she
said.
But Alan's insistence interrupted her. "Come on, let's get out of here.
That tunnel-mouth, or cave, or whatever it is--"
"But we go in there," she protested. "A little tunnel. That is our way
to travel. We are not far from my city now."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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