The city itself was a terraced mass of colored buildings cut by many streets and interspersed with gardens. Several towering palaces of white and gold, the abodes of the Lords of Gral-Thala, dominated the lower buildings. It was good to see real sunlight again! To see birds flying overhead! To smell the odor of flowers and growing things, in contrast to the flat and motionless air of the Lost Caverns! It was hard to believe that this pleasant spot was really the scene of such a brutal tyranny as he had been told. Then they rounded a bend in the sloping road and came to an abrupt halt. * * * * * At the side of the road stood a sort of gallows, made of strips of a ruddy metal bolted together. From it hung the nude body of a young Lunarian girl. She was suspended by her bound wrists high above her head, and her feet swung far off the ground. From the clotted blood at her bound wrists, and the way the eternal sun of the valley had burned her skin, Larry knew that she had hung there many hours. The girl was far gone but she was not yet dead. At intervals her drooping head moved feebly from side to side. A pair of armored soldiers leaned on their weapons below the gallows. Around the girl's neck hung a sign, lettered in the archaic English script that was the official language of Gral-Thala: "THIS GIRL DARED STRIKE ONE OF THE NOBLES OF GRAL-THALA WHO CONDESCENDED TO NOTICE HER." Fierce anger filled Larry Gibson's heart, a consuming anger that set his clenched fists shaking. For some reason he thought of Diana. Though she stood only a few feet away from him, he visioned her hanging from such a gallows if the dissolute tyrants of this land ever stormed the Lost Caverns. Then Pyatt of Kagan laid a hand on his arm. "Careful, my friend!" the Lunarian hissed. "Your anger shows on your face, and that is bad. We cannot help that poor girl now. Come!" They went down into the city, avoiding the broad boulevards and keeping to the narrower streets where the poorer people were. As they passed by the base of one of the high palaces, they came to the body of a girl who lay crushed on the stones and had evidently been thrown or jumped from one of the upper windows. An aged man stood astride the body, leaning back and shaking his skinny fists at the white and gold bulk of the palace above him. "Woe be upon the Lords of Gral-Thala!" he screamed in his shrill old voice. "Triple woe upon the tyrants and upon the decadent parasites who fawn upon them. Evil lies in wait for ye, lurking in your white palaces with your guards and your harlots! The hour of doom is not far away! The vengeance of Gorton and Laila may be long delayed, but it comes in the end! Woe to the Lords of Gral-Thala!"