"Do you think me lovely?" "You know you are." "But I like to hear people say so. I like to hear you say it," she added softly. The roars of hunting beasts came up to us from the dim forest aisles, the screams of stricken prey; then the silence of the night broken only by the murmuring of the river rolling down to some unknown sea. I was considering a tactful reply to Nalte's ingenuous observation when I dozed and fell asleep. * * * * * I felt some one shaking me by the shoulder. I opened my eyes to look up into Nalte's. "Are you going to sleep all day?" she demanded. It was broad daylight. I sat up and looked around. "We have survived another night," I said. I gathered some fruit, and we cooked some more of the meat left from my kill of the previous day. We had a splendid breakfast, and then we set off again down stream in our quest for--what? "If we do not find Duare to-day," I said, "I shall have to admit that she is irrevocably lost to me." "And then what?" asked Nalte. "You would like to return to your own country?" "Of course." "Then we shall start up the big river toward your home." "We shall never reach it," said Nalte, "but--" "But what?" I demanded. "I was thinking that we might be very happy while we were trying to reach Andoo," she said. "Andoo?" I queried. "That is my country," she explained. "The mountains of Andoo are very beautiful." There was a note of wistfulness in her voice; her eyes were contemplating a scene that mine could not see. Suddenly I realized how brave the girl had been, how cheerful she had remained through the hardships and menacing dangers of our flight, all despite the probably hopelessness of her situation. I touched her hand gently. "We shall do our best to return you to the beautiful mountains of Andoo," I assured her. Nalte shook her head. "I shall never see them again, Carson. A great company of warriors might not survive the dangers that lie between here and Andoo--a thousand kobs of fierce and hostile country." "A thousand kobs is a long way," I agreed. "It does seem hopeless, but we'll not give up." The Amtorians divide the circumference of a circle into a thousand parts to arrive at their hita, or degree; and the kob is one tenth of a degree of longitude at the equator (or what the Amtorians call The Small Circle), roughly about two and a half earth miles; therefore a thousand kobs would be about two thousand five hundred miles. A little mental arithmetic convinced me that Nalte could not have drifted down the big river two thousand five hundred miles without food, and I asked her if she was sure that Andoo was that far away. "No," she admitted, "but it seems that far. We wandered a long time before we reached the river, and then I drifted for so long that I lost track of time."