But at last we made him understand. An ingenious fellow! He took a shadowy paper and pencil from his pocket and wrote what he thought we intended to convey to him; and we read it and nodded and smiled--grimly, for this was grim business indeed--grim, horrible! When at last he knew, astonishment, terror was upon him. And he was off down the road at a run, waving his arms, shouting no doubt, screaming to everyone his terrible warning.... We rejoined Thone upon the height overlooking the struggle. He murmured, "I see you were successful. And just in time--this is almost over now." The battle lines still held. But what a change was come to our enemies! There was no mistaking it now--their bodies were materializing. The purple haze carrying the malignant influence of our fighters, was forcing their bodies into the Earth-state!... The town above us, warned by our messenger was emptying. Vehicles--shadowy moving shapes of cars and wagons--were scurrying out of it over all the roads. The houses were empty; the roads all thronged with fugitives on foot. Empty-handed; and families trudging with what little worldly goods they could carry in their arms. Wagons and cars piled high with household furnishings hastily rescued. The lines of pedestrians urged, lashed to greater haste by frightened officials. An exodus from death into safety.... The end came suddenly, unexpectedly swiftly. Thousands of ghostly bodies, there beneath the ground of the village abruptly leaping over the last gap into material being. _In the ground_--the earth, the rock--the very atoms of these foreign bodies intermingled, blended to their essence with the atoms of the rock and soil. And suddenly leaping into solidity.... The scene everywhere seemed to shudder. Its grey details slurred into a blur, a formless chaos of power unleashed. A soundless rumble; a sweep of tumbling movement. Upward, with a burst; an infinity of newly created entities demanding space. Space! Demanding it; heaving upward over the path of least resistance to find it.... As though, there in the bowels of the earth a pent-up volcano had suddenly broken forth, the abandoned village heaved into the air; rose, shattered apart, and fell in a tumbled waste. An earthquake, a very cataclysm of nature outraged.... A shattered, tumbled mass of wreckage where a moment before there had been a village.... Fire leaped to the last destruction.... Smoke rolled up in great spiraling clouds.... And visible, down beneath the ruin, a ring of victorious shimmering ghosts, standing awed and alone in the empty darkness.... CHAPTER XXI EACH TO HIS OWN ALLOTTED PORTION We stood in the Borderland with Thone and Ala. "You will not return to our Ego-world?" said Thone. It was a statement in tone, rather than a question. "You are right, friends. Each to his own, as the Creator intended. Your world, better for you--but ours, best of them all, for us."