"Gad!" thought he, as the Pauillac swept its long, flat-arc'd trajectory through the night, "under any circumstances this must be a terrific wrench for them. Talk about nerve! If _they_ haven't got it, who has? This trip of these subterranean barbarians, thus flung suddenly into midair, out into a world of which they know absolutely nothing, must be exactly what a journey to Mars would mean to me. More, far more, to their simple minds. I wonder myself at their courage in taking such a tremendous step." And in his heart a new and keener admiration for the basic stamina of the Merucaans took root. "They'll do!" he murmured, as he scanned his lighted chart once more, and cast up reckonings from the dials of his delicately adjusted instruments. Half an hour more of rapid flight and he deemed New Hope River could not now be far. "No use to try and hear it, though, with this racket of the propellers in my ears," thought he. "The searchlight might possibly pick up a gleam of water, if we fly over it. But even that's a small index to go by. The signal-fire must be my only real guide--and where is it, now, that fire?" A vague uneasiness began to oppress him. The fire, he reckoned, should have shown ere now in the far distance. Without it, how find his way? And what of Beatrice? His uneasy reflections were suddenly interrupted by a word from Zangamon, at his right. "O Kromno, master, see?" "What is it, now?" "A fire, very distant, master!" "Where?" queried Stern eagerly, his heart leaping with joy. "I see no fire. Your eyes, used to the dark places and the fogs, now far surpass mine, even as mine will yours when the time of light shall come. Where is the fire, Zangamon?" The fisher pointed, a dim huge figure in the star-lit gloom. "There, master. On thy left hand, thus." Stern shifted his course to southwest by west, and for some minutes held it true, so that the needle hardly trembled on the compass dial. Then all at once he, too, saw the welcome signal, a tiniest pin-prick of light far on the edge of the world, no different from the sixth-magnitude stars that hung just above it on the horizon, save for its redness. A gush of gratitude and love welled in the fountains of his heart. "Home!" he whispered. "Home--for where _you_ are that's home to me! Oh, Beatrice, I'm coming--coming home to you!" Slowly at first, then with greater and ever greater swiftness, the signal star crept nearer; and now even the flames were visible, and now behind them he caught dim sight of the rock-wall. On and on, a very vulture of the upper air, planed the Pauillac. Stern shouted with all his strength. The girl might possibly hear him and might come out of their cave. She might even signal--and the nearness of her presence mounted upon him like a heady wine. He swung the searchlight on the canyon, as they swept above it. He flung the pencil of radiance in a wide sweep up the cliff and down along the terrace. It gave no sight, no sign of Beatrice.