"Now Ruthar, if her stars shine brightly, shall put a big stone before his chariot-wheels and break his power," Oleric said, "repaying evil with evil until good come of it, and the Goddess Glorian reigns from the capes at the north to the southern seas. And in that I pray that my part shall not be small." With a laugh he added, "This is a strange game for me to play--Oleric the Red, loose-mouthed soldier and slayer of men--who in Ruthar am known as Oleric the learned, a professor in the University of Nematzin, which is hard by the hill of Flomos, on the banks of the river Illia." "And this Goddess Glorian--" asked Zenas Wright curiously. "Is she a statue in a temple, or the good star of Ruthar, or is she merely a name?" For once the readiness in answer of the red captain deserted him, and he stared at the geologist with open mouth. Then he said soberly: "No statue in a temple is the Goddess Glorian. Good star of Ruthar she is surely, and, in addition, she is the fairest woman on whom Shamar ever had looked down from the skies. And now her time comes on, for which she has waited many a hun--" Oleric broke off suddenly and turned his eyes on Polaris with a strange look. "Nay," he said; "for the rest you must learn from the goddess herself. My tongue does clack like a shepherd-wife's." Nor would he then or thereafter tell more of Ruthar and its goddess. Zenas Wright mused to himself, and the train of his musings ran thus: "Oleric, you seem to keep your promises, and you are a good fighter, for I have seen you fight. But when it comes to your tales of living mammoths in this twentieth century, and of a goddess in the shape of a woman who has _waited many a hundred years_--for that was what you almost said, my friend--why, then, I can't follow you; and I think you like to draw the long bow." Swiftly as the marizel traveled, that night wore into dawn, and day and darkness came, and still another dawning, ere Urk turned off his power and filled the air-chambers which raised the vessel to the surface of the sea. They had rounded the southern coast of Ruthar and beat up along the eastern shores, and here, as they arose from the depths, straight ahead of them lay the mouth of the river Illia. When the voyagers saw it, they did not wonder that Adlaz found little fortune in attacking Ruthar by sea. An irregular fissure in the frowning face of the cliff discharged the river into the sea. That rift was nearly thirty yards wide at its bottom, and narrowed almost to nothingness far above, where the red granite of the headlands towered many hundreds of feet in height. Down the glen in the fissure the river Illia tripped to the sea like a lady down a stately stairway. For the rock of the river-bed was shelving, in strata which varied from less than a foot to nearly three feet in height, and some of the shelves were as much as ten yards in breadth; so that the water came down that great natural stair in a series of broad cascades.