"So they call their country Romantica. They are not a scientific people. They do not struggle for advancement. Art has taken the place of science. Painting. Sculpture. Music. They have developed music very far. It has a soul here. It speaks--it sings--it seems a living entity. It is--what music ought to be, but seldom is--the pure voice of love, of romance. . . . I was telling you about our country. Most of its population live in villages, and in individual dwellings strewn about the hills. There are but two large cities. This one--the largest--they call Crescent. Or at least their word for it suggests the shape of the lake. The other city is about fifty miles from here"--he gestured again--"off there where you see the line of mountains. They call it Reaf. It's a quaint city. Built largely over the water--rivers there--hot, subterranean rivers which rush underground--under the mountains. They go--who knows where? No one has ever been down them. The mountains are honeycombed with caves, tunnels, passages leading within, and up. Always up. But into them no one has ever penetrated. Legends tell fabulous tales of a great world up there. The giants, we think----" When Brett and Martt had first come here, giants had appeared. Dwindling giants--strange, savage beings of half-human aspect. They had appeared--no one knew from where. Growing smaller until they were normal size to this realm. Not many had been seen. Some had kept on dwindling; they had grown so small, when attacked, that they had become invisible. At the thought, I moved my foot involuntarily with a shudder of uneasiness. Here on the floor beside me now, men like beasts might be lurking, so small I could not see them. Yet in a moment they might grow to a stature greater than my own. . . . Men like beasts! . . . And I remembered that, with size gigantic, they had destroyed the third city of Romantica. Upon Brett's face lay a cloud of apprehension. "We have never heard from them since. It is thought--I think myself--that they came from the subterranean rivers, or through the underground passages of the mountains. I conceive this concave surface upon which we're living to be the inner surface of a shell. It may not be very thick--there at Reaf. Above it--beyond it--up or down are mere comparative terms--beyond it must lie some vastly greater outside world. This whole realm is doubtless within an atom of that greater world. It would be a convex surface up there--with a sky and stars beyond. . . .