With Urk, the sailor, squatting among the levers of his engine, the marizel of Oleric swam steadily and swiftly down the western coast of Maeronica. Under water she went, well off from the shore and showing no lights. Oleric showed his passengers the marvelous valves in the sides of the little vessel which were similar in construction to the mask with which they already were familiar, and by means of which the air in the marizel was replenished with oxygen drawn from the sea water. Also, he told them somewhat of the land to which they were journeying, explaining why it was that Ruthar, though smaller and more sparsely populated by far than Maeronica, had never been conquered by the larger power. It was a land of forests and mountains, he said, and all the way around its ragged coastline were huge, precipitous cliffs, the overhanging crags of which were a natural barrier to invasion. Wherever had been a break in the cliff-line, the Rutharians, by dint of great labors, had filled the breaks with walls, closing the gaps so that the only places where one might land on Ruthar from the sea were certain spots where narrow stretches of beach lay at the foot of the towering cliffs. At only one point could one come at the interior of the country from the sea, Oleric said, and that was at the mouth of a river named Illia. That place was closely guarded, and nature and the hand of man had united to make of it a way where one man might defy a thousand. Years before, the red captain said, the Rutharians had had a few small ships. But they had little use for them, and with the perfection of the fademes by the Maeronicans, nearly a century before, the Rutharian vessels had been promptly sent to the bottom. Metals were easily mined, and in abundance, especially gold, in Maeronica. But the materials which produced the power for the fademes and for their terrible destroyers were scarce and precious. Therefore, the growth of the navy of Adlaz had been slow. But with the fulfillment of the mighty destiny of the Children of Ad in mind, the scientists labored unceasingly, and it was in the mind of Bel-Ar that he was to be the man to see the accomplishment of that destiny. He waited but the equipment of a few more fademes to send his dreadful messengers forth to take and hold all the seas on earth, compelling the nations of the world to bow to the power of Adlaz, as tradition told him they once had bowed before.