Verrill laid out three daggers. He picked one up, jabbed it into the top of a table cluttered with heaps of goatskins, dried apricots, raisins, and bags of coriander seed. He bent the weapon until the grip touched the table top. He released it. It snapped straight up, with a fine, high pitched _spang_. He plucked a dagger from the mountaineer's belt, drew the other weapon from the table, and slashed them edge to edge. He cut shavings from the mountaineer's weapon. Then he stropped his own blade on the palm of his hand for a couple of strokes, and next ran it along his arm. The hairs toppled as he cut them free; there was no drag at all, the edge was so keen. "Mine are not trade daggers," he said. "Bet you the three that Ardelan will listen to me, and not throw me out." The Terrestrian's eyes gleamed. "What do I put up for a bet?" "A pair of those boots you're wearing. Put my knives in your belt now. If I lose my bet, they're yours. If I win, you're welcome to them anyway." So the caravan men fitted him out with garments and boots like their own; and Verrill went into the mountains with them. II The trail snaked along precipices and wound past narrow, hidden valleys. At the foot of a cliff lay the shell of a space-cruiser which had been telescoped from its original six-hundred feet to a bare two-hundred, though much of the nose had melted from the impact against the rocks. Gnarled oaks and junipers reached up from a riven seam of the shell. The metal had not rusted. It was merely tarnished to a slate gray. It was a mine of such metal as could have furnished all manner of implements for the Terrestrians--but they did not know how to exploit it. Finally, Verrill was looking down into narrow, upland meadows where sheep grazed. There were barley patches. His eyes felt as though they were full of sand. The snow-white glare from cliffs, and the dust which rose in yellow puffs at every step, made the way a torment for one accustomed to the paradisiacal clime of the Venusian Domes. Each day's march brought the donkey-caravan within sight of alternate trails, guarded by mud-brick towers, where armed men were stationed to watch the moves of hostile neighbors. The return, even without pursuit, would be dangerous. At last they came to Ardelan's mud-walled houses, huddled on a rocky shelf which overhung a fertile valley. The settlement was surrounded by a wall of earth and stone, and had escaped contamination because no one would have bombed a 12,000 foot range of limestone peaks except by mistake. When the trading convoy filed into the tangle of flat-roofed houses which surrounded a hard-packed central square, women, children, and dogs came out, each in full voice. The procession kept straight on toward the entrance of a two-storeyed building. Half the ground-level was a stable; the rest, a courtyard where Ardelan and a handful of armed companions lolled under an awning of black goat-hair.