He staggered to his feet, still in the other's grasp, striking frantically out with clenched fists. Now the other two had raced up on the mound, he saw, and were leaping toward the combat. Then Rowan gave a frantic wrench and twist, felt himself and the creature holding him tottering at the rim of the abyss, and then they had fallen, still striking and twisting, had fallen upon the great disk as it hovered momentarily at the pit's edge beside them, and locked still in deadly combat upon that disk were sinking ever more swiftly downward, into the darkness of the giant shaft, into the raging of the deafening winds, down, down, down.... 4 For how many minutes he struggled thus with his lizard-thing opponent on the great disk, Rowan could not guess. Twisting, squirming, striking, the two rolled about, and then as the powerful muscles of the creature began to wear down his own resistance, Rowan put forth all his strength in one last effort. Grasping the scaled body of the creature with his left arm he encircled its conical head with his right and twisted that head back with all his force. There was a moment of intense effort, a frantic threshing of the creature in his grasp, and then a muffled snap as of breaking bones, and the thing lay limp and still. Rowan scrambled up to his knees, panting. Around him now roared the deafening torrents of ascending and descending winds, and a few feet away from him the smooth metal wall of the great shaft was flashing upward with immense speed as the disk shot downward. From high above a pale white light fell down upon him, a little circle of white radiance that was swiftly contracting, dwindling, as the disk flashed down. In a moment it had dwindled to a spark of light, and then had vanished entirely. And then about Rowan was only darkness--darkness and the thundering bellow of the raging winds. He crept to the edge of the great disk, now, peered down over the low protecting rail that rimmed it, straining his eyes down through the darkness. The flicker of light he had glimpsed from above was clear now to his eyes, a tiny patch of quivering red light that was growing rapidly stronger, larger, as the disk flashed down toward it. Crouched at the great descending platform's edge Rowan gazed down toward it, hair blown back by the great winds that raged past him, clinging to his hold against their tremendous force. The patch of illumination was swiftly broadening, until it lay across all the shaft far below, a crimson, quivering glare. And now it seemed to Rowan that the downward-shooting disk-platform was slowing a little its tremendous speed. The gleaming walls around him were not flashing upward so swiftly, he thought, and then even as that thought came to him the great disk shot down out of the darkness of the shaft and into a glare of lurid crimson light, into a titanic, cavernous space which seemed to his eyes in that moment limitless.