At last I staggered into the open space. The last of the giant trees exploded into flames not a score of yards behind me. Sparks rained upon me. My clothing caught fire. I ran on, fighting at it with my hands. The jungle back of me roared deafeningly, an angry, surging sea of lurid red flames, awful, overwhelming, fantastically terrible. Heat radiation poured across the clearing in a pitiless beam. I struggled on across the white sand, away from flames that tossed themselves up like volcano-ridden ranges of scarlet alps, until I reached the shelter of a great boulder on the slope below the cliff. I flung myself down behind the rock, gulping down the cool air and rubbing out the fire in my clothing with my blackened hands. For many hours I lay there, tortured by thirst and pain. At last I fell into a light sleep of troubled dreams, in which huge, winged, green ants flew after me through burning crimson forests and in which I saw the dear form of Melvar devoured again and again by the flames. I was awakened, after a time, I know not how long, by a cool wind that had sprung up from the north. For a moment my mind was lost in blank wonder, and then came the desolate memory that Melvar and Austen were lost. In hopeless misery I got weakly to my feet and walked unsteadily around the boulder until I could look across the clearing. As I leaned against the rock, gazing eastward, it was a strangely altered and desolate scene that lay before my eyes. The red forest was gone. Below me was a region of low rolling hills, black and grim beneath the lowering, smoky purple sky. The white sand about me stood out in sharp contrast to the charred and gloomy waste beyond, from which a few slender wisps of dark smoke were still rising. All life was gone. It was a dead world. But still the dense purple clouds poured out of the shafts of the underworld, adding their weight to the dismal sky. A great homesickness for the world, and my fellow men came over me. Then I heard a strange humming behind me, and a slight metallic clatter. I turned around in apathetic curiosity. * * * * * A Strange Duel And I came face to face with a monster so utterly strange and weirdly terrible that the very shock of it almost unseated my wandering reason. But so completely had my interests and hopes in life been severed, so near was I to the great divide of death, that I was past emotion of any kind. At first I looked on the thing with a curious lack of interest, as the soul of one newly dead might look with numbed faculties on his new habitation. But as I looked upon it, an icy current of fear stole over me like the creeping cold of the north, and clasped me to its frozen breast. I had met so many horrors that I had begun to think myself immune to terror. But I had met no such thing as that.