The canoes slowed and sheered off from the pulpy underwater shelf of the island Masson had almost rammed. Hundreds of the scaly monsters floated sleepily in the water, their yellow spines and bulging eyes carpeting the shallow depths for several acres. Ashore dozens of others crawled about on their stubby bowed legs searching for the tasty vegetable tidbits that their saurian palates desired. Luckily none of the vallids saw them, or if they did they were not interested, and they backed water until the eternal low-lying clouds of the wet planet shielded their ungainly craft from view. They commenced paddling cautiously away toward the right only to again encounter the shore of an island swarming with the ugly snouted saurians. At intervals they attempted to proceed again in the direction they had been heading but always they encountered more vallids and the low-lying shore of an island. An idea was beginning to dawn in Masson's gray-skinned skull. This must be a larger island than any they had before encountered. "Perhaps," he said, as the other canoes drew abreast, "this is the shore of Tular. There would be swamplands and mud flats if it were. Thidin would grow up about the central mountain." A slim-faced frog man named Reppart nodded. "Probably you're right," he agreed. "Never saw so many vallids before." He shrugged his shoulders. "But how do we get through them to the land?" "Should be a river." Ellis was dipping out the water that the ceaseless heavy mist of rain poured into the boat. He gestured with the hollow gourd-shaped husk of a nik-nik fruit. "We follow the river in." "But we have found no river," sneered Dolan. "What now, General Masson?" Irene Croft's softer voice cut across their conversation. "But we _have_ found the river," she said. "See the current pushing out toward us from the island? And the color of the water is different, grayer." "You're right," cried Masson exultantly. He picked up his paddle and sent the canoe probing forward into the thick murk of the cloudy wall ahead. * * * * * Three, or perhaps four miles the men from Earth paddled upstream along a mile-wide channel that carried the steady surge of the river seaward. They came at last to the first waterfall, a low rocky shelf that lifted but five feet above the green floor of swampy thidin vines and the grayish ooze that floored them. The firmness of rock was welcome underfoot. The slow darkness of the Venusian night was falling and so they made their camp on a level shelf of rock a few hundred feet back from the waterfall's muted roar. And with morning they pushed onward up the river. The stream forked a mile above the first waterfall. They chose the larger stream on the right and paddled between low sullen black cliffs of basalt for perhaps another three miles. Here a lake spread outward fanwise from three giant cataracts that boomed and frothed as they poured over a sheer hundred-foot precipice.