He stood inside the sphere at its lowest part, and gazed up into a circular space that, to his startled senses, seemed of stupendous magnitude. Woven about this vastness at all heights and angles was an intricacy of webs; webs built in concentric circles; webs composed of long parallel cables crisscrossed by shorter cables; webs ascending as sharply as the riggings of sailing vessels; and webs spun into hammock-like floating platforms. All the strands were thinner than a man's small finger, and shimmered strangely in the many-hued fluorescence of great light-patches on the ceiling; and somehow their iridescence, their shifting rainbow hues, their purples, ambers, aqua-marines, scarlets and turquoise blues, made them seem all the stranger and more sinister. But most sinister of all were the great beings sprinting along the webs or dangling spider-like from a thread. Now for the first time Gates saw his captors clearly; for now--as he was later to learn--they had brushed off the powder that made them virtually invisible to human eyes, and stood forth in their full grotesqueness. Their outlines were what he had already seen: gigantic, spidery, with octopus limbs ending in many tentacle-like curling fingers. He had not known, however, that the monsters were encased in a scaly armor, which glittered with every peacock hue in the unearthly light, changing chameleon-like from ruby to emerald, and from gold and violet to bronze, jade and sulphur-yellow. He had not known that they had wide pouting greenish-gray lips, from which at times a faint smoke issued. He had not realized that they were equipped with long whips of tails, each ending in a horny dart, with which they could strike an enemy with appalling effect. He had not anticipated that they would talk with a peculiar whirr, a little like the grating of a buzz-saw; nor had he expected to see the pouches beneath their lower ribs, in which some of them, kangaroo-fashion, carried their young. Scarcely had Gates been deposited in the Planetoid when he made still another discovery. "Great heavens, look at Ronald!" he heard a familiar feminine voice. And, wheeling about, he found himself staring at Dunbar and Eleanor, who gaped at him not half a dozen yards away. Both were, literally, as white as ghosts--wide-eyed as persons who have looked on unmentionable horror. Gates noticed that Dunbar's hair, usually so sleekly glossed, straggled in wild disorder; that his tie was a rag, and his coat buttons torn off as if in a struggle; while Eleanor's clothes were in rumpled disorder. Yet he noted with relief that neither captive, apparently, had been hurt. "Thank God!" the girl explained. "You're whole and sound!" "Even if a little mussed up," Dunbar forced out, with a wry grimace. "Good Lord! Why, his shirt is in ribbons! And his collar--"