The terrain was rocky--a bleak, desolate waste, barren and empty. Tumbled rocks, buttes and spires, all slate-gray, sleek and glistening like marble. A tumbled terrain, with fissures and cave-mouths everywhere; rifts, gullies and huge canyons. Was it rock, or metal? Extremely dense--it had that obvious aspect; a compressed little world, with its surface broken, mangled as though by some titanic cataclysm. * * * * * It was a frigid little world. White patches of snow and sleek blue ice everywhere were apparent. But it was melting ice now. Weirdly in places it drooped, grotesquely leprous where it had melted away. And in the hollows, there was water. Off to one side, a big bowl-like depression was a lake of water, scattered with melting ice. Frigid world, but now approaching the sun, warmth was striking down, melting the congealed surface. Masses of ice turning rotten. As I stared, a great frozen mass which hung like a white veil over a hundred-foot cliff abruptly broke away. Sunlight chanced to strike it as it came splintering down, so that it looked like fractured spun glass, a riot of prismatic color. "John! Look! There, down at the lower corner!" Alan was tensely pointing to a corner of the image screen. What was this? I stared and caught my breath. It seemed that against a distant ice-spire which stood like a stalagmite on the weird melting landscape, a white figure was poised. It seemed to move a little. "Someone alive down there!" Alan murmured. "Look--that figure moved!" Zura inhabited! We had never given a thought to that, save to assume that it was not. My fingers were shaking as I fumbled at the telescope, shortening the focus still further, giving a greater magnification of a much smaller area. Our fluroscope screen blurred; then slowly clarified, with an area of only a hundred feet or so. Numbed, we stared at a white figure which was against the ice-spire. A girl! A human girl? Heaven knows, it seemed so. Pale white in the weird Zurian daylight, she stood motionless, seemingly gazing out over the melting landscape. A girl the size of a girl on earth. A white garment, white fur perhaps, draped her breasts and thighs. Her long hair, white as a veil of frozen falling water, was tumbled over her shoulders. Woman carved in white marble. Woman molded of sleek ice. If we had not seen her move, she could have been a strange statue of a beautiful earthgirl, frozen there. Then suddenly as the swirling clouds shifted, a shaft of sunlight fell upon her. There was a pink-whiteness, like a delicate flush, on her limbs, neck and face. For that second Alan and I breathlessly stared. And then, as though the sunlight were something horribly frightening, her little body seemed to shudder. She turned, plunged into the shadows of a rock-rift and was gone! IV